In coming months, residents in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and the rest of the UAE will see swarms of bright neon pink motorcycles darting about the place. Reserved for deliveries and logistics, this platoon of electric motorcycles is funded via blockchain-powered investments, courtesy of two innovative tech companies pushing forward alternative and cutting-edge methods of raising capital for tangible investments. 

"Dubai's logistics and food delivery sector is on the brink of an electric revolution,” Kaustubh Padakannaya, co-founder of Pyse, a leading green asset financing platform, tells Maddyness. “Our partnership with MANTRA allows us to tokenize the leasing of electric motorcycles, making them accessible to retail audiences. This initiative celebrates Dubai's sustainability goals while providing affordable mobility for all the rider heroes.”

In short, Pyse enables individuals to invest directly in green assets like electric mobility, solar power and water efficiency. Meanwhile, the technology from MANTRA, a leading blockchain company focused on real-world asset tokenization, provides unparalleled transparency and efficiency thanks to the public nature of blockchain technology, whilst also enabling small investments, en masse. 

“As the demand for eco-friendly delivery solutions in the region rises, this partnership positions MANTRA and Pyse at the forefront of bringing quality and purposeful real-world assets [into the blockchain world],” a spokesperson for MANTRA tells Maddyness. “The deployment of these eye-catching pink electric-vehicle motorcycles marks a significant step towards achieving Dubai's ambitious sustainability goals.”

There are few equivalents, globally, beyond Toyota's Blockchain Lab exploring the tokenization of vehicles and ownership rights via blockchain, back in 2020, and California's Department of Motor Vehicles, which has digitised 42 million car titles using blockchain to better detect fraud and smoothen the title transfer process this year. 

By recording every lease, payment, and ownership transaction via blockchain, MANTRA ensures a transparent and immutable system that allows stakeholders to verify data. This level of transparency is difficult to achieve with traditional systems, which rely on centralised databases prone to errors, tampering, and limited visibility.

Additionally, MANTRA enables fractional ownership, allowing smaller investors to gain exposure to the last-mile delivery business. Blockchain technology plays a key role in this by facilitating fractionalised investments through the use of tokens, which are digital representations of tangible assets. For example, a specific number of tokens will represent ownership of a set number of pink bikes. 

Blockchains are distributed and tamper-proof databases that ensure every transaction is securely recorded and easily trackable. This transparency allows investors to earn proportional returns while significantly lowering the barrier to entry, making investment opportunities more accessible to a broader audience. 

While fractional ownership can be implemented in Web2 – the current version of the internet – it often involves complex legal frameworks, higher costs, and reduced fluidity in transferring ownership, making blockchain-based Web3-solution a superior alternative.

In short, as far as bright neon pink motorcycles go, the UAE’s new fleet is some of the cleanest, greenest and most innovative in the world. 

Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman.