TLDR
**Home sharing platform like Airbnb with 0% commissions on bookings and listings
**Allows users to earn cryptocurrency with no technical knowledge
**Immutable peer reviews
**Integrates with 3rd party identification platforms
**Allows development of additional crowd sharing applications
Ticker – BEE
Available at www.ethershift.co - IDEX- ForkDelta
What is Bee Token?
Bee Token (BEE) is a blockchain based home sharing application. Users can rent homes or put their own home up for rent, similar to AirBnB, but they can earn cryptocurrency for their listings. They offer the ability for renters and homeowners to conduct their business on a decentralized network that lacks a middleman, this allows both parties to keep more of their money. By using the blockchain, this startup strips away up to 20% of the losses incurred by competing platforms.
While the AirBnB platform largely controls the reputations of its users, in the Beenest system, the name of the platform where these rentals will take place, these rankings are decided on community reviews. These are immutable, and they can not be altered, removed or tampered with after they are posted. This means that the community can be truthful about which listings are good or bad, and no one can buy their way to the top of the rankings. Users of the platform will be made to go through a KYC procedure, and their identities can be verified through third party platforms. This is likely to be useful for protection against bad tenants who might wreck a host’s property. By using this feature, they can seek payment for damages, all automatically implemented via the blockchain.
With the reduction in fees, next comes a reduction in involvement. AirBnB goes a long way to make sure that their listings are safe and attractive to potential users, even going as far as helping connect landlords with professional photographers. They also act as a mediator in disputes, and they offer their homeowners liability insurance. To a homeowner who is frightened of potential litigation should someone be injured on their property, this may be worth the fees charges by the company. Not to mention the massive amount of marketing dollars that they put behind their product.
While some are excited about Bee Token, others have some reservations about its usefulness. As far as the investment goes, it does not really have a good use case. They allow for listings to be paid for with other cryptocurrencies, and there’s really not a good reason to use Bee Tokens over any other, and this creates a problem for investors. Lower reputation users can stake tokens to raise their reputation, and thus lower their security deposit, but in this case it seems easier to just pay the deposit. If there’s no demand for the token, then there is no price increase. They do however have one other interesting feature, other sharing economy apps can build upon the Bee Token chain, and then plug the blockchain into their existing companies. This could be a very promising feature, and depending on how well it works, other companies in this space could follow suit on their own tokenization. All in all its a decent project with good team. 7/10
