“First it was Uber and Careem, now it's Bolt, tomorrow it will be something else,” says the stoic Walid. After he’s done with his day job, he puts in several more hours ferrying people to and from the nightclubs and bars of east Beirut, popular with tourists and the Lebanese diaspora in town for the summer.

For the young moonlighting taxi driver, trying to scrape together a living in Lebanon, a country facing economic ruin, Bolt is just the latest in a cycle of apps that promise jobs and opportunities in an otherwise moribund market.

Worth over $6 billion thanks to a flood of venture capital from investors from Europe to China, Bolt, founded in Estonia in 2014, boasts that it is the fastest growing tech company in Europe. Company CEO Marcus Villig put it plainly in a January interview, when he said that the downside of working in developed markets was “more regulations.” He contrasted this oversight and enforcement with the looser constraints of the Eastern European, Asian and African markets where Bolt first launched.

In practice this means that in cities like Beirut, Bolt feels free to impose conditions on taxi drivers desperate for work that would be unacceptable and even illegal elsewhere.