bright yellow commuter bicycles appeared on the streets of Seattle,

rentable for just $1 an hour.

They come from a $2 billion Chinese startup called Ofo,

which is hoping the rollout will give them an American toehold

in the global bike-sharing market.

Dexter Thomas reports from the company's home base in Beijing,

where low-cost bike-sharing is ubiquitous and big business.

— Zhang Jincheng is a maintenance worker.

He works for Ofo,

the biggest company in a new wave of bikeshare services.

Most bikeshare programs around the world use docks to collect and dispense bikes.

But with Ofo,

you can leave your bike anywhere you want.

And if you see an Ofo bike you wanna use,

you just scan a code with your phone, unlock it, and take off—

for about 15 cents an hour.

This kind of bike-sharing is new in China,

but it's already becoming indispensable.

— Ofo was created in 2014 by college students at Peking University.

It didn't expand off-campus until last November,

and just eight months later,

Ofo was the biggest bikeshare company in the world.

Ofo now operates in 150 cities, including a few outside of China,

and it claims to have more than 100 million users

who make 20 million bike trips per day.

Thousands of new yellow bikes roll off the line every day,

just to meet demand from Ofo.

— The original way of using bike is not that convenient.

If there is a bike that people can access anywhere in the city at a very low cost

and can return with a very good convenience,

then people must love it.

— Zhang Yanqi is a COO of Ofo.

He used to work for Uber,

and joined the company last November when they expanded off the college campuses.

Chinese tech giant Ali Baba has poured millions into the company,

and Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the company's headquarters earlier this year.

— How many people do you have actually registered on the platform?

— It's over 100 million users.

It's a big number.

But in China, we have 1.3 billion, so we still have some way to go, but…

— Okay, that's one way of looking at it, alright.

— In a way,

this is a return to the culture that made China the so-called bicycle kingdom.

In the bike's heyday,

there were more than 500 million bikes in the country,

compared to roughly $370 million today.

— Dr. Rong Jian is the Director of the Beijing Traffic Engineering Association:

— But Rong admits there have been a few issues with the bike boom:

When you can leave a bike anywhere,

people tend to leave them everywhere.

Sidewalks and public walkways in popular areas often get completely blocked off by bikes.

And in some areas,

there have even been reports of hundreds of bikes being thrown into massive piles.

In fact,

Ofo had a trial run at the University of California San Diego,

but the university kicked them out

partially because people were parking the bikes all over campus.

But they still have high hopes for Seattle.

— The goal here is that we're gonna go to over 20 countries by the end of this year.

We wanna unlock every corner of the world,

and we wanna provide a bike for people to use anytime, anywhere.