above: Joshua Sanerive

In 2015, a tiny close-knit mining town in regional Australia was left reeling after a 300-ton truck was involved in a fatal accident with a young driver who was distracted and on her phone while driving. Rick Markham, deeply affected by this tragedy in his community, vowed to do whatever he could to prevent such accidents in the future. 

Now, Markham and two co-founders have created KSafe, a mobile app that incentivizes people to improve their driving habits by awarding points that can be redeemed at the app’s marketplace. The app tracks a driver’s performance across the three biggest causes of serious accidents and fatalities: speeding, distraction and fatigue. The driver’s safety score is calculated at the end of each ride which results in points being awarded.

KSafe co-founder Joshua Sanerive was brought into the project after seeing the success Sweatcoin had with its 120 million users that it rewarded with sweat tokens for walking.

“We have gamified safe driving,” Sanerive said to me recently. “By providing incentives by way of rewards, it is already sticky with 8,700 trips a week being logged. We have the belief that people want to do better. So, we really want to create a system that rewards people for doing the right thing, because there’s millions of people out there every day that are trying to be better.” 

In Australia, phone distraction is a leading cause of accidents, amounting to 22 percent of car accidents and 71 percent of truck accidents.  

Sanerive also believes that with the cost of fuel rising along with interest rates and living expenses, the app will become an attractive option for drivers who wish to earn rewards like food vouchers as a way of cutting costs. KSafe has formed a partnership with Giftpay, enabling its users to redeem $10 and $50 gift cards, based on points earned, that can be used for groceries at Australian supermarkets Woolworths and Coles, petrol at BP, Ampol and Shell, and at Kmart, to name a few.

Top of mind though is the impact that KSafe makes. “We can actually see that there has been between 18 percent to 20 percent increase in driver safety across our user base, which is amazing,” Sanerive said.

Despite being in his mid-20s, Sanerive has already lived seemingly many different lives – as a rugby player, a builder of a dance-event business, touring the world as a professional hip-hop/street dancer known as a krumper, to working within the disability sector.

Needed diversity in web3

Sanerive comes from a mixed heritage of Chinese, Fijian, Samoan and Australian, a background that gives him a unique perspective on the importance of accessibility, diversity, education and inclusion. All those factors are the fundamental ingredients of a successful web3 ecosystem, he believes.

“It's rare to see another Polynesian in the financial or startup space,” he said. “I really believe my people have great ideas and there are real needs here in our community. I think that some of the ethics that we have been raised on as part of our culture are very, very much needed in these spaces. This is an opportunity to not only help my family, but my people with different things and hopefully down the line we can have more Polynesians in the space and have us doing more things. And not just the web, not just the financial space, but the web3 space. Having our voices heard.”

He added, “the biggest improvement that web3 needs to bring is accessibility. Anyone can access a website now, so how will we build a web3 that anyone can access? Access needs to become normalized and in an everyday format for it to work.”

Sanerive acknowledges that the opportunities of the crypto revolution are now inescapable. KSafe’s other founders Markham and Blake Robinson are both entrenched in the crypto space and it seems inevitable that blockchain technology, tokenomics and even the metaverse will become part of KSafe’s evolution. For now though, the company is focused on growing its user base and saving lives.