A Second Swiss Municipality Is Receiving Covid Relief Funds Through The Tezos-Based ‘Ecoo App’

Erlenbach & The Tezos Blockchain

During the COVID pandemic, local businesses have seen their sales decline. To support these businesses, some local governments choose to distribute an economical impulse to support these local businesses. But randomly distributing an amount of money, does not guarantee that the money goes to local businesses as intended.

What if you could securely distribute value that is only spendable at places that need the financial impulse most? The Ecoo app, built on Tezos, can achieve that exact goal.

In October last year, the Swiss city Wetzikon used the Ecoo app to distribute COVID relief funds to its residents. As announced in a press release from Ecoo that we received today, currently a second Swiss municipality is using Ecoo for that same purpose: the municipality of Erlenbach.

The municipality of Erlenbach is making 100 francs available to every resident of Erlenbach which they can use to shop in Erlenbach shops. In total, around 570,000 francs will benefit local businesses in this way.

The impulse program is processed via Ecoo, the revolutionary digital platform for earmarked transactions, which has already made a similar program possible in the city of Wetzikon.

Ecoo app

With Ecoo, earmarked funds – in this case the vouchers from the municipality of Erlenbach – can be made available as credit in a smartphone app. The residents of Erlenbach can simply load the 100 francs into the wallet of their Ecoo app by scanning a QR code.

The municipal businesses then collect the vouchers using the Ecoo app and can finally change the collected coins back to the city – again via the app – for real money.

Ecoo thus enables a closed cycle of a dedicated “currency”, registered on the Tezos blockchain, in a clearly defined ecosystem and is as easy and secure to use.

The platform and associated app were developed by the three partners DU DA Data & Commtech by Farner, Farner Consulting, and Papers and are based on blockchain technology from Tezos.

The impulse program of the municipality of Erlenbach is a success. By June 14th, around 5,600 vouchers had been issued. 150 businesses have activated the wallet to enable payments with the vouchers via the Ecoo app, and over 9707 transactions have taken place with Ecoo.

Sascha D. Patak, Mayor of Erlenbach:

Other use cases for the Ecoo app

The Erlenbach project is the second real-life application that Ecoo launches, but it has many more possible use-cases. As mentioned in the official announcement:

• Tourism: guests can pay with «Tourism Coins» at selected shops, railways, and businesses

• Events or festivals, where visitors pay with coins, while the partners, e.g. a catering stand, collect the event currency via the app

• Companies that want to give their employees meal vouchers not only for the canteen, but also for the nearby bakery or the pop-up restaurant on the corner

• Health insurances that credit the insured with “Health Points” that can be redeemed at selected partners. This simplifies the organization of partnerships in the health sector, for example in the area of ​​health promotion.

This is the fifth application on Tezos that is used by European governmental organizations

• The Gendarmerie’s cybercrime division (C3N) of the French military police has been running an accounting application on Tezos. This was the first huge validation of the Tezos project. It shows the number of trust authorities has in the security and development possible on Tezos.C3N has been running a smart contract on Tezos to simplify accounting.“On this type of financing, Europol asked us for precise accounting. So we spent the money and each transaction was entered on the blockchain quickly after purchase. This is what enabled us subsequently to have payments validated by Europol” explained Edouard Klein, R & D project manager at C3N.The switch from accounting on traditional databases has not only simplified accounting for C3N, it also drastically reduced costs. Where they previously had to add 40.- EUR for administration costs, these costs are now reduced to a few cents.

• The second application was a digital voting application in 3 French cities. Avosvotes developed an application to enable digital voting for local authorities.

• The Swiss city Wetzikon has distributed their COVID relief funds on a Tezos-based application. This was the first real live use case that was deployed on Ecoo.

• Last week was announced that the French City Neuilly-Sur-Seine Will Launch Digital Voting Application On Tezos In September. The app is based on the academic level work of Electis, which has been working on a Tezos-based voting application for a long time. Voting can now be done digitally and anonymous, while ensuring end-to-end verifiability.The Electis application has been successfully tested by 80 leading global universities.

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