Why GPS Needs Crypto to Evolve | Mike & Christopher, GEODNET

Transcript

the United States it's interesting the infrastructure in the United States for high Precision navigation is pretty poor geonet is really leading the way to get a dense uh fully modernized Network in the United States very quickly and so I go to conferences and international conferences and people who are trying to export equipment they're always like well I can't you know I can't get anything in the United States it's the worst it's the most expensive with the least coverage and here we are we're approaching full coverage in the United States hey everyone Santi and I have been talking about salana a lot recently and we're excited to have a salana sponsor of Empire marinade marinade is a staking protocol on salana and the only stake pool that delivers Auto rebalancing me rewards and automatic

downside protection with their new protected staking rewards optimize your sole stake with marinade by hitting the link in the show notes big thanks to marinade we'll talk more about them later in the show hey everyone the polygon Community grants program was launched with one billion tokens All For polygon Builders really excited to share that on today's episode of Empire season 1 of the polygon Community grants program is now live it features 35 million in madic to support the next generation of polygon projects join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon.com liquid staking protocol deployed on

ethereum and governed by mantle mantle reakes 100,000 me to generate massive igen layer points every day basically your chance at being part of the igen that will be given out to meth holders on mantel L2 you can check it out meth that's mmle doxyz campaigns that's a mouthful we'll put a link in the show notes for you to check out and learn more big thanks to mantel [Music] all right everyone welcome back to Empire we have uh Chris Perkins the president of coin fund and Mike Horton founder of goet joining the show Chris Mike welcome to the show guys hey thanks Jano good good to be here thanks yo thanks for having us yeah yeah so um the

context for this is I've been seeing Santi subtly tweet about this thing that he invested in called geod net and then he's been talking to me about it for for for months at this point on Telegram and just on on our conversations and I know very very little about geonet and so I basically just said look let's have let's have Mike on the show Chris I know you've brought up geod net to me in separate conversations you guys are really excited about them at coin fund so Mike I'm gonna ask some really dumb questions to kick off this podcast what is geod net let's start with the most basic of the questions sounds good so geod net first of all it's an acronym and it stands for the global Earth observation decentralized Network and it's a network of what we call call

satellite miners that are providing fundamental infrastructure to satellite navigation systems and allowing for people to get high Precision highly accurate location on on their devices be it everything from mobile phones to um core you know infrastructure building devices like tractors and cranes and um excavators on construction sit so a whole wealth of of real world applications um you izing our infrastructure nice um seems like something not everyone off the street could go build uh why why are you like how how do you know how to build this well I've been in the uh positioning and

location um industry navigation industry my whole career and this is one of the kind of uh problems that's been there for a long time so um these satellites are deep in space and they travel signals travel through the atmosphere the atmosphere is a chaotic uh it's electrically active the osphere and the troposphere electrically active and it causes distortions to the signals which then reduce the accuracy and reliability of this of the system the satellite navigation system that we all use every day people have been trying to figure out a way to scale up a solution to it for years and and what we found is that um you know it's extremely expensive to try to do this in the web two-way in fact myself and one of the co-founders worked on it trying to build out

infrastructure in the web 2way and we quickly realized it wasn't scalable um what blockchain and deepen bring to the party is a way to build out this infrastructure so it's really new infrastructure that's being created around the world um for modernized what we call satellite navigation and which is in layman's term GPS but it it it it you know got we got into it from the point of view of we wanted to you know make these systems more reliable and more accurate in a way that was scalable and blockchain and web 3 really provide a incredible solution to do that before getting into the crypto side of things Mike what what is the problem with GPS because like for for me like GPS works pretty well on my phone you know so like

what what is the problem we're facing yeah the problem with GPS is uh you know from your perspective it looks pretty good there's actually a lot of tricks going on behind the scenes including use of data uh from augmentation networks already even in your phone that's not providing you centimeter accuracy but your phone wouldn't boot up if it weren't for a global terrestrial Network like geonet um one of the data products that the Network like us provides is called the satellite ephemeris and that's what's letting you get that location in a couple seconds I don't know if you recall back before um these types of techniques had been pioneered and you bought a Garmin nvie and you would go to a city you turn the newe on you would wait for 10 minutes right before that thing would give you a position that's what it's like without

augmentation so what geonet is is a highly advanced form of augmentation that provides not only a speed but also accuracy improvements um the the the reason that the accuracy is not great is because there's variable delays you can think of uh they call it Tri trilateration or triangulation right it's a classic time oflight measurements from the satellite to your to your phone there's a distance um that distance uh is you know you divide by light speed you get the time Delta right so you solve for that to get your position relative to the satellites unfortunately there's variable delays it's not a straight speed of light type of thing when it goes when those signals travel through the ionosphere and troposphere

they experience variable delays you have to compensate that out if you want to get the best accuracy to do that you need observations that's why we call it the global observation um decentralized Network right global Earth observation decentralized network is because you need those observations everywhere um space weather is changing all the time um as we just saw there was a huge solar storm that created even unusually large activities but it's ongoing all the time it's like the wind it's like the rain you know there's always uh changes in the ionosphere to be able to compensate those out provide that reliable High Precision lock to GPS you need to compensate for those factors as you look at applications that involve Ai and spatial intelligence things like uh

autonomy things like drones things like automation for productivity purposes in in the field you need Precision um without augmentation from a networ like geonet you're looking at uh you know two to three meters and in British terms at 10 feet you know um it's pretty big uh and if you just sit there and watch that position will drift you come back the next day the position will be somewhere else by you know two three feet it's always everything is moving all around and if you want to lock on and map something and repeatably get to a certain position on the ground you need you need much more Precision than that our system delivers sub inch accuracy so it's a it's really an order two orders of magnitude Improvement and and

Precision Chris I can't help but Wonder hearing Mike explain this so I know about your time in the Marine Corps does your time in the Marine core and then you guys really understanding this investment and this project have any overlap there man beyond so I actually started the military at the Naval Academy and one of the things that gets drilled into your head in the military is you always need to know where you are so at the Naval Academy we started we start we studied uh Celestial navigation where we'd have to do start shots use all these different books um really tough course actually to find out where you were and and there's like when you step back and and this was just drilled into my brain over the years like it's really really important to know where

you are and is three meters good enough it's two meters good enough I think as we start unpacking some of the applications here the answer is no it's not good enough and that's what kind of what the light bulb was uh for for me um years later I was trained as a survey officer officer in the Marine Corps like and again accuracy is so so important I think as you move forward you know the applications that you can see with this technology are profound um let's start with Precision agriculture right um and I'd love to unpack this at length um this technology rtk technology has been around since the 1990s and I think I'm sure Mike will explain it better than me

but if you're a farmer and you want to plant your crops do you want to plant them to 3 MERS no you need accuracy you you need centimeters to to be able to plow and to be able to spray um and and we can talk about why decentralization is so powerful maybe later um what about like automated driving like do you want to be accurate to three meters no you're probably G to get an accident um I think a centimeter is a lot better like what about arvr like Pokemon go love it to death but as you get more advanced in in gaming like isn't centimeter accuracy better and so you start unpacking you know amongst other things the value of going from three meters to a centimeter like the the I think the opportunity here is is pretty pretty material yeah

so Mike maybe we can get into the crypto side of things um why did it why did it not work to build this company in a web two manner you you mentioned that in a in a sentence why Why didn't it work yeah so people have been trying it for a long time and have built out networks that are on the order of 5,000 nodes it's notable that within two years net now is at 7,000 nodes so we've been able to do what it's taken industry 20 years to do and in two years we've been able to build that with more consistency um and reliability in the sense that all of our stations are uniform which is something that's super important for um the the space people love to have a consistent uniform

network of stations um like geonet is opposed to all different kinds and makes and models of uh stations out there which is what comprises the web 2 it doesn't work because it's super expensive uh and and very timec consuming so we looked at doing it in the web two way and even you the the receiver Hardware even the infrastructure of the station were free when you go do it the web two-way you're Contracting individual people um typically like American Tower crown castle um self storage locations these are the places that people put cellular infrastructure those guys want anywhere from $2 to $5,000 per year for rent to start with and you need to get a very

good location a lot of these places like a Cellular Tower is not an ideal location for gnss Reference Station because um there's a lot of you know cellular bands are very near the GPS bands in terms of RF so you have a very high power thing transmitting right next to your very sensitive thing it's not ideal you would need to be very tip toop location on a cell tower which is the most expensive place then you need to get permits then you need to pull internet it it quickly balloons into a huge Capital infrastructure project which is is extremely expensive um running into the billions and tens of billions of dollars to get to a to the network size that we want to get to and it's very time consuming and uh it takes years and years to to to to build this

type of infrastructure out um and then finally you have like sort of how do you do it on a global basis right so one of the things that I think really attracts the web to side to our project is that it is it is the word permissionless and that people can add notes to the Network where coverage is needed they can do it quickly they can do it in a way that they can count on the quality the protocol itself makes a bunch of guarantees to to the users of the network that the data that they will get is precise data um there's 24 by7 monitoring stations are removed that's all part of the protocol that then in turn releases rewards so that infrastructure that blockchain infrastructure is actually kind of a fundamental element to solving the problem trying to just blindly put up stations and pay people rent it just

doesn't scale um and it results in really terrible economics for the marketplace what what is the what is the marketplace like every every deepin company right has two sides you've got the supply and demand what what is that for you guys well broadly speaking the marketplace is the GPS marketplace right so we're working with companies from the chipset level down making GPS chips all the way through to end users at construction sites who are trying to survey to sub inch accuracy to make permanent drawings for a building and across all that anyone who's using you know satellite based location is is a all the players in that ecosystem are um potential customers and participants in the geonet ecosystem that market broadly

speaking is $200 billion dollar now and growing very rapidly the satellites uh a lot of new satellites have gone up um there's a future with low earth orbit satellites those will also have a very fundamental need for geonet infrastructure um to to manage the ionosphere and tropospheric effects that we talked about earlier they're even more pronounced with lower orbit satellites so the field of satellite navigation is just growing rapidly the use cases are um from consumer through some of the most advanced High Precision systems in the world and we really address all of those and then the supply side is you go put a minor on your uh I don't know if you call miners but you you put a machine I'm I'm assuming on your roof or outside your house or

something like that yes we do and we uh we do call them miners we call them satellite miners um we also call them space weather stations uh you need to get them up on your roof with a clear sky view um and a stable internet and power connection and and you're often running mining geod net we encourage people to look for empty hex's um because that's where you have an opportunity to earn what we call location nft so if you're a first mover and get your station set up well so it's providing reliable high accuracy data um you can earn what our location nft which then gives you kind of a first mover right in that hex so that you're guaranteed to have available to you the highest rewards rate um for the long term of the project and and that's

something that we think is important to um create a a stable long-term infrastructure is to make sure that it's not a sort of a uh a kind of a gold rush to try to get in with anything any installation what we really want is a stable strong Network because that's what provides the exponential value yeah Chris can you walk me through maybe the coin fund investment thesis on this yeah I I think any time that you're looking to invest and again um just what you know we are investors just want to make sure there's there's people do their own research uh but you want to look at at Tam Founders and frankly the one thing I like is utility um you know look Mike is is one of the the premier

experts in this technology in the world um and and this project is so fascinating because you're able to Leverage What makes web 3 special um by by by by able to create the largest rtk Network in the world leveraging the incentivization of tokens right um to deliver real utility so so i' would love to take a minute to talk about some utility and I'm going to start with like a very simple example with Precision agriculture okay today 27% of farmers in the United States use Precision Agriculture and it's it's the largest of the large right why because of all those things that that Mike spoke about you have to you have to hire a big

centralized company to put up a big tower it's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars you're going to have to subscribe for every single vehicle um that you use thousands of dollars per year and so why would you do it because for scale if you use this technology you're going to have better yields it's very simple in the context of climate change you're going to have better yields it's very important but only 27% of farmers use it because it's so expensive you got to be big to be able to afford it mik comes along and now you're able to subscribe for a very fraction of the cost it unlocks that this utility and and by the way farming is just a very small vertical but it's very um easy to to understand um by the way like how many times throughout our

career oh I got this great technology what can you do with it well this is real and when I go down to DC and I talk to policy makers and be like you know what we're actually um using crypto to to help farmers like the light bulb that goes on is incredible right because this is real utility using decentralization to help a demographic that's been locked out of certain advances in technology humongous application and that's only one small vertical I talked about some of the other verticals M Mike mentioned construction we talked about gaming um automated vehicles and so you have an you have an industry with a growing Tam you have real real utility um and you have deepin and you know my sense is that deepin really hasn't had its moment yet in crypto we're investors in in a

few projects across the board board um ones like demo uh which uses which uses cars um to to and their data but um you know you you have an incredible founder with with a growing T and like real real utility um that that's something that I think is really interesting yeah I mean um just to corroborate with that um the reason why I like junet so much and again none of this is Legal Financial earning advice is to me it was very perplexing where when I first spoke with Mike it felt to me that Geon was getting way more traction outside the industry outside of crypto than within crypto and I think there's reasons for that but um

you know Mike maybe you can talk about like when you go to these industry conferences the reception that you get from you know people in in in different verticals particular agriculture or some other verticals uh even you know drivers that are using geonet to improve the location and the tracking and to me that's that's really encouraging um I I think deepen really makes crypto relatable like anyone can understand if you get a better data plan if you get if you're earning more money as an Uber driver because you have more Precision or you know you're playing Pokemon go and all of a sudden you have more reliability or in agriculture but to me that's really interesting like most of the time we see the inverse where like crypto companies there's a lot of hype um but there's not a lot of real we talk

about this word utility uh and it's sort of something that we punt but this is actually real and you're getting a a lot of reception in these conferences so maybe you can talk about that Mike because I found that to be really interesting yeah so I mean the the project started by introducing the idea at The Institute of navigation gnss plus conference and this is a um academic and government oriented conference with the top mines and the theory and infrastructure of satellite navigation sort of what upgrades should be done to the satellites how how to do better algorithms for precise location and so forth and it's pretty you know it's a pretty intense audience um we presented the white paper there and I was pretty concerned that with the crypto angle and

the blockchain angle that people wouldn't receive receive it well and we won best paper and from there the project started and we've always had as much interest on the web two side and what we're doing as in the web 3 if not more it's because it really first of all I mean satellite navigation is decentralized in a sort of unique way today already we your phone is receiving data from Russian satellites you may not know that but you're receiving data from Russian satellites European satellites and many uh many phones are you're also receiving from Chinese satellites so you're you're already leveraging a decentralized network when you do location so I think there's an inherent understanding that this creates robustness and reliability in the field that we're in um and then the the

ability to scale up a solution to this problem that's been around for so long that um hasn't been really solved in a in a global Mass Market way I think is an extremely attractive value proposition so we started out from a conference that is very focused on the infrastructure our white paper was published in the Journal of navigation which is a peer review journal um as well and uh top journal and all of navigation and started to go to the commercial s shows and also receive very good reception there and that's where we found our customers frankly is at these events um you know these are places that people go to find the latest Solutions and Technology in in the field of positioning mapping navigation autonomy

uh drones um equipment we go to those shows show our solution and people um you know really don't think about the blockchain angle at all it's like well I can get a station AC cost effectively set it up if I if I need to get coverage in an area or I can just buy the service if the coverage is there it's very attractive I mean these are day-to-day problems that people have um in their businesses the United States it's interesting the infrastructure in the United States for High Precision navigation is pretty poor and uh geonet is really leading the way to get a dense uh fully modernized Network in the United States very quickly and so I go to conferences and international conferences and people who are trying to export equipment they're always like

well I can't you know I can't get anything in the United States it's the worst it's the most expensive with the least coverage and here we are we're approaching full coverage in the United States um and we're we're basically there in the EU we have pretty much in coverage of the continent um and and we're starting to turn our focus more and more to the developing world where there is no infrastructure at all today one of the things I love about the developing world is that we build the infrastructure out in the developing world as a commercial reliable solution and where the first guys to do it we probably will be the only solution ever created in that uh environment because the cost and the cost of our Network the the density of the the stations it just doesn't it doesn't lend itself to other

people coming in after us what it lends itself to is people leveraging what we've built um just like you wouldn't think about creating a new internet today right you would you you just leverage the internet that's there we're building that internet for high accuracy navigation I want to double click something that you said Chris which I think is really important this idea that like crypto enables a new type of business model the same with it I like it to like software as a service as opposed to like companies themselves having to invest all this capex they could just rent software on a person seat basis back in like 2001 and then that detonated a huge movement and I sort of see the same in deepen right and Mike maybe if we could just go through a series of questions right like because there are public companies there are um

web2 companies that have tried to scale out in a traditional way and they've raised I mean you know this better but like how many there's like two or three and they've raised from private Equity like hundreds of millions of dollars right yes they've raised uh uh collectively probably $250 million to um tackle the the same problem to build mass Market High Precision infrastructure they've looked at the traditional companies and said they're moving too slow they're not adding enough coverage let's let's go to the private Equity inventure Capital markets and raise it um they have a fraction of the number of stations deployed that we do uh so it's been a tough go um and it hasn't been enabling and I think that the ecosystem approach as well where everybody can participate you know our

token is followed very closely by a lot of folks in the web to infrastructure side I think they looking at it as a as a as a opportunity for them to participate in the upside of what's being built as well because it's a solution that um really can transform the whole industry it can really leverage um you know physical infrastructure on the ground it's a little bit of a buildin they will come type of thing when you when you put in New Roads new airports that all of a sudden attracts um new markets and new and new business and and that's what geonet is that's what the industry sees that we're doing we're building this new infrastructure and that's going to lead to New Markets and growth of existing markets that wasn't there before and just to um emphasize the idea

as opposed to you having to front the capex you're having all these do-it-yourself enthusiasts all over the world say hey look I can be the first to set it up or I can you know participate in this network I'm gonna I'm gonna put that money up front myself you know get an nft and you know there's a very clear like token economics here that they perhaps see in the same with that like Bitcoin miners like are are investing in as6 to like um you know mine Bitcoin no different here right um but like give us a sense of scale like how many how many like um when you say you've mapped out a lot of the EU a lot of the US what is that in do you have a sense of like the the ca for all like collectively is these participants and

um like what would it take for you to like cover the entire world well we're looking to get to uh over 10,000 by the end of the year um as a goal and uh you know 20,000 will provide I think very robust coverage for the developing world and a lot of the uh I mean for the developed world and for a reasonable part of the developing world and then the long-term goal is to get to 100,000 stations so there is um you know longer term if you look at the project there is a bit of a scarcity play the the the thing about geospatial is it's inherently decentralized and that's what makes it so difficult for a centralized approach to work it is inherently decentralized you physically have to get these things into all these different

locations but at the same time the actual total capex at some point sort of levels off that needs to be spent now doing it with deep in is a two-orders of magnitude more efficient Capital wise than doing it the centralized way not only just in terms of you know leveraging DIY but also just fundamentally more Capital efficient it is more Capital efficient to reuse your home and to reuse your home internet and to reuse the power at your home then to put that in somewhere else now if you're doing a cell tower you don't really have a choice you need to get it up really high it needs to have super high bandwidth backbone that's just not the case for the problem that we're trying to solve so we're able to really elegantly reuse the physical decentralization that that the actual the surface of the Earth is a scarce

resource um in our protocol it's a very elegant you know toonomic usage of that that provides real utility people have talked about these land nfds and things like that but a lot of that's been sort of in a gaming context this is actually using that same scarce resource the surface of the Earth as a real physical constraint that's actually needed in a real world uh utility Mike I could just try in I think to santi's question you're also seeing some companies popping up this is not just a a fully retail uh distribution right maybe you want to talk about that yes so certainly in drones and in agriculture both have been leading the way and having um their user bases deploy nodes so we have uh Distributors

and dealers of equipment for farming who have um worked with their user bases to add uh nodes to the network in Rural America and also in uh Europe particularly in Eastern Europe gone very quickly now now starting also in Spain and um uh Germany and and more Central Europe as well in the a application so you have we have seen that crossover work very nicely um those are you know companies that are dealing in equipment um and dealing in services for you know drones and farming it's been a a very quick adoption of our of our technology Mike it's very similar pitch to helium I think in the early days of

like look it costs a lot of money to create the infrastructure let's have the people do it run these iot networks and there were good things from Helium but there were also things that they probably got wrong so I'd be curious when you think about some of the earlier dpin projects that came before you like what takeaways do you have both on the hey they did this right let's let's replicate that and then hey look I they probably got this wrong let's do it differently well I think there there's there's two two angles to that one is on the web two side and one's on the web three side so let me just take the web two side first I think Laura is a super cool uh technology you know the iot networking standard that helium uh is helping standardize and helping promote um I like a lot but it doesn't have a

strong uh a clear Marketplace as high Precision location does a lot of people who use Laura um networks they do it for an internal purpose so it's like for a hospital it's not a network where you necessarily there are some applications where you want to roam but there are a lot of applications that are sort of um proprietary or localized to a specific building or a location so the utility of a broadscale wide area network isn't as strong and the standard isn't as strong it's a um there many sort of there's different classes of devices on Laura networks um it there's not as as strong uh history of standardization as there is in in gnss that strong standardization leads to Quick adoption

um the industry has put these standards in place so it's very easy and trivial for a customer who's using equipment today that supports rtk to switch to geonet and that's helping adoption um and I think the utility uh of the solution in the costs that people have been paying kind of demonstrate the the value that's there um so that's the web two side that I think is really different between say high Precision location on Laura but I do think Laura will have its day and I do think it's very important and has a lot of utility so I I I do think that it's just going to take more time for that those applications to build out the second piece is the web three side and I think definitely there we've uh learned from the tokenomics we are really incentivizing building a highquality

network and one of the things that struck me is I participated in helium in the early days and think it's a it's you know really brought a lot of the ideas that are in deep into to bear for sure but the sort of uh things that were being sold um for for Miner for infrastructure and helium a lot of them didn't really incentivize putting up quality coverage and this was both in their tokenomics but also in the sort of Hardware kits that were being sold you'd get a small whip antenna you set up on your desk you weren't really providing um really high quality coverage and they had a lot of cheating uh in the protocol in the early days they've worked to address that so there was a lot of tokens that were emitted that didn't create a highquality network and

in the end of the day that's the highquality um reliable Network infrastructure is really what um will bring in the revenue and uh by putting out a lot of tokens um too quickly um without providing that actual real world coverage um to enable people to use a network I think is is kind of the core web three mistake that was made Mike do you have what does the revenue look like today so we're right around a million in ARR um and we have been growing through adding new um customers who are all kind of going through a roll roll out phase so I think one of the exciting things is we've exceeded the number of of people sort of

signing Enterprise deals to use the network than we thought we could possibly do it's really really going quickly and each of those things then has a sort of a roll out and scale out that looks very encouraging over the next couple years of course um you know market conditions can change and and certainly one of the things I think in deep in that you know web 2 is still looking is this a long-term solution it's very attractive to the web two side of our Marketplace the economics are very attractive the scalability um I think it needs to go through a little bit like BTC Bitcoin no longer to people question that it's a fundamental part of our financial infrastructure I think from um ethereum salana people really see the value that smart contracts have provided nobody questions that smart

contracts is going to be a fundamental part of um a lot of Financial Solutions out there I think deepen hasn't quite crossed that barrier we hope we're one of the projects that can show the way that this is a long-term solution to core infrastructure problems that this is a real way to build and scale infrastructure um and I think that that's of of all the things out there that would slow Revenue down it's it's doubts and concerns that deepen may not be the right long-term solution and so we're pushing very hard on the web two side and and on the protocol side to make sure that we deliver truly reliable highquality infrastructure and demonstrate that over and over again when we have problems fix them make sure

that that that delivers and then the revenue will will scale up dramatically hey everyone Santi and I have been talking about salana a lot recently and we're excited to have a salana sponsor of Empire marinade is a staking protocol in salana I remember when they launched I think it was back at a salana hackathon and they were funded with this 80k grant it's super cool to see how far they've come they're the only Stak pool today that delivers Auto rebalancing me rewards and automatic downside protection with their new protected staking rewards you can stake natively or liquid steak with marinade and get the same high performance delegation strategy that thousands are using already to stake your soul to over a hundred of the best

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the agir that was a big mouthful so I'm going to tell you what it means in my in my words there's all these things popping up l2s and l3s and it's chaos right if you are building something you no longer have to worry about bootstrapping liquidity you can basically just build in the a layer to tap into the liquidity of the a layer and the users of the a layer you get the users you get the liquidity it's the agay it's hot it's by polygon Labs they've got the polygon Community grants program it was launched with 1 billion tokens Just For polygon Builders season 1 it's live right now it features 35 million in mtic to support the next generation of polygon Builders join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon.net SLG grants that's

polygon.com receipt token of mantle LSP the base yield is currently 3.2% but there's also more on top of that mantle reakes 100,000 me to generate igen layer points every single day mantle is now the third largest address getting igen layer points a big part of the igen that's going to be distributed is actually going to be given out to me e holders on mantle L2 including all the daps and there's daily screenshots Bridge the me to an L2 that's bridge. mantle. XYZ you can enjoy being a part of the uh hopefully igen that will be given out to me holders so big thanks to mantle for letting Empire listeners know about this really exciting thanks again

mant let's say you guys are wildly successful and everything works and it's like I don't know five to seven years from now who are three or four or five big customers where you're like that's a dream client dream deal that we could do for them well I think you'd have Tesla Amazon um Google those would be you know three of the the big three that um are very much active in enduser applications that absolutely leverage uh High Precision location day in and day out and and I think those would be dream clients Mike the one thing I've seen with dpin Founders um is there's probably the least Focus I actually messaged Santi uh earlier in this podcast I said it's really refreshing to

see a Founder with this kind of background it's like a totally new type of background coming into crypto new new type of founder new new experience um I don't know what you studied in college but clearly seems like some sort of mechanical engineering or I don't know electric something like electrical engineering computer science yes don't engineer for sure yeah so just it's great to have someone with your background the um thing I've seen with a lot of dpin Founders is there's a la uh lack of For Better sometimes for better sometimes For Worse focus on like building community and on like numberg go up technology with token candidly like how do you think about some of the more Crypton native sides of building a deepend company well I think we're um about to unlock a lot of things that

will help drive that I agree it is a it is a weakness in the deepen Community um not all projects is not a weakness I think there's some out there that are doing really great things on community we're looking and looking to learn from them um I think it's super important I think that uh um you know it's it's something that is it with with the it there's a lot of things to focus on in parallel and I think one of the biggest challenges is like you've got a community you've got tokenomics you've got um working with your web 2 customers you've got building up distribution channels um and and proving out the reliability of everything so lot of uh a lot of things to juggle Community is one

I would agree and deepen has has often fallen down and I think that it's um Paramount to focus on it I think Community provides a lot of resiliency and strength and and through you know through and through so we're focused on it we're trying to improve I think uh it's an area of improvement for geonet for sure yeah how how do you solve the thing that happened to helium which is people come in they they run up they they spin up the miners they can actually make a lot of money if they're first into an area but then as that area gets more populated they the the dollars decrease right yeah I think that's a a huge part of our tokenomics so our tokenomics um you know first and foremost our tokenomics emphasize utility um that utility is realized

through a burning mechanism that burning mechanism Burns uh tokens completely it sends them to the debt address so our total circulating Supply is decreasing I think the second uh element is scarcity so you know we don't need millions and millions of nodes out there and we have tokenomics that you know reward uh first mover advantages like the location nft so the scarcity encourages people to get installations in early and get them done correctly but then prevents too much token emissions and then finally we have having so we have an annual having it's coming up on June 30th um so that as the network growths uh again we're controlling that emissions to um you know be something that long term is is

scarce and I think that's one of the core elements that um you do have to go a little bit slower in the beginning so that you know you can sustain it over the long term and I think the community is you know something that kind of goes hand inand with is harder to get the numbers to be huge on the community side when you're when you're dealing with something where you do need to roll it out in a way that preserves the scarcity of the token yeah do any of the web two customers that you guys go to not want to work with you because of your token um no I wouldn't say that I would say that uh most of them are very curious and interested some have already

jumped in on the token um but for the most part it's a curiosity and it is something that um they see as providing economic advantage and they see it as is is is all the things that Santi described they see it as a new way of you know building infrastructure that makes a lot of sense so I um wouldn't say that anyone's turned it down there certainly they you know will raise questions about you know how does it work um are you worried about regulatory issues these types of things that I think broadly deepen in the whole crypto industry would be wonderful if if more of these Solutions you know come out and certainly thank all the work that coin fund and all the other groups that are working to help clarify and improve

those things are doing it's it's tremendous uh support from the from the industry in this regard yeah Chris what about um I mean you you spent a lot of time in DC do you think um do you think something like this like let's say you took this to your to your to your like military friends and you're like I've you know you've got the location data is three feet now I can go to three inches or three centimeters or or whatever it is and they're like that's amazing you're like yeah but it's a crypto company and it's got a token just a heads up is that uh is is crypto still so badly viewed that that would be a a deterrent you know I speak to my Marine buddies all the time most of them are pilots uh they give me a hard time obviously like all

of us about certain things like for some reason they really don't like nfts but that's that's not here or there but when I started talking to them about geod net like the light bulb went on and literally i' I've asked them questions Mike's had incredible responses you know we're going through some real challenges globally right now on ensuring that you have redundancy and accuracy and a lot of these guys are pilots they they fly commercial airlines Etc and they look at technology like this and they're like I need this I need the redundancy I need the accuracy um maybe Mike can talk about you know some of the ways that this can like help various Industries particularly in a world where there's a lot more spoofing in in different War zones Etc you're more of an expert than than me Mike but like this project um

and maybe it's because of our military bias about how important accuracy is but they they've really um enjoyed it last thing I'll tell you is that like I go to to DC all the time and I I keep talking about Farmers why because the cftc is um overseen by the a committee right and when I go to them and I say hey guys I have something that's going to help your Farmers the the reception that you get is is profound because everyone wants to help farmers and I can't tell you how many farmers I spoke to because I did that's what you do when you do due diligence and they're like wait you're telling me that my costs are going to go down um no one ever tells me this they treat up selling me and it's awful like I want to I I need to learn

about this so like policy-wise I think there's so much to unlock but maybe Mike you can you can unpack um you know some of the things you know last thing I'll say is we had this huge solar storm right and guess what um it happened at the peak of planting season and I think you know uh jet performed quite well so maybe you can talk about some of the redundancy Mike yeah I think that um to to to make satellite navigation work it's very tricky it's a very complex system that involves a lot of physics and math and so so forth and uh the the need to get more redundant data the need to get data from the ground this terrestrial data that we that our Network collects is just Paramount to Reliable operation and it's also Paramount to detecting problems and

one of the things that Chris's pilot friends are talking about and it's been in the news Aton is there's been a really increased use of uh jamming and spoofing and on really northern Europe as well as in the Middle East and it is presenting such a such a problem to such a degree for commercial aircraft that certain routes have been cancelled so actually certain routes that don't have alternative approach mechanisms besides a GPS approach have actually just been outright cancelled for a period of time um until things kind of settle down our infrastructure this isn't the core problem that we've decided to go after as the First Market I think every business needs to think about like what's the sort of Entry strategy but you can definitely use geonet to detect

jamming and spoofing and these are data products that we are and talks with people about potentially commercializing um to help augment um you know augment aircraft uh applications as well as Naval applications against um jamming and spoofing it's quite dangerous you can you can potentially you know bring up a plane into airspace you don't want it to be in um in an extreme case you know if there's no alternative for an approach and you have weather and the GPS system isn't working well you could miss your approach and C the aircraft so it is something that is is a is a very real um case where this kind of infrastructure can provide tremendous value um what what about the use case of

um I'm I saw this I I just watched a CES uh big Expo show like takeaways video on YouTube and there are a lot of like inhome robots and uh I would say like external to the home robots but like on your lawn like lawn mowers and yeah posted on this on Twitter so there there's a couple manufacturers we already selected geonet to use um there'll be in this next week yes one announced next week another one announced a couple weeks after that um there'll be both you know Professional Services that are mowing like landscapers fleets mowing with geonet they already mowing with geonet I should say that one's already live there'll be

a consumer robot launched with jet here within the next uh month or two just been ramping they've been ramping up production doing final testing I posted a picture on our Twitter yesterday from from the factory so yeah that's a huge Market it's one I'm very very excited about I think deepen has a big role to play there um in general but yeah these these robots they're green they keep your your lawn trimmed every day I have four of them here at at my property in um Los alos Hills we've been been testing as well got a couple down in Texas they're super nice I mean you know they make your yard look really great it's like getting a haircut every day and um yeah it's it's a it's a simple thing

but there's an Roi right I mean you you pay money to landscapers Roi for landscaping firms to use these as a as a tool to enhance their business there's an Roi for people who have a simple lawn to just use them as a standalone solution just have it mow your yard every day and there'll be more of those or delivery robots there's obviously uh drone delivery it's a it's a great it's a great um technology I'm super excited about small robots I think this is something that uh will have huge growth over the coming years it's hard to land a robot if if you're only accurate to three meters right yeah so drone in a box drone delivery these are fundamental users of rtk if you look on videos You'll all see

um that this is just drones in general even just the flyability of a drone um improves tremendously with rtk you have wind right so you're trying to take good photographs you're trying to keep a drone on target um if you don't have rtk it can only use GPS to sort of have it in a general way and if it doesn't have much to look at it can't use the camera I mean this uh cameras are very useful as a as a as also as a navigation source and there's a lot of like the robots typically integrate GPS with cameras so they both Solutions are important but if you're if you don't have a lot of what they call geometry the cameras don't work they they can't differentiate relatively where they're at so if you want take great pictures with a drone in the wind

um rtk is a great solution it'll put your it'll keep your drone within a you know a golf ball size three-dimensional pattern and that you know makes it much easier to fly makes makes it much easier to collect imagery so from the most simple basic application of flying a drone just making it more flyable all the way to doing drone survey we're going to build a 3D model of the world and you're going to guarantee to the you know your in client the contractor that you've produced an accurate 3D model to inch level accuracy so they can buy materials and plan construction that whole Space all of it can use rtk H that's really cool yeah I have two friends who work in the uh self-driving space two of the bigger like self-driving car companies and uh yeah I

mean they've just told me about the like kind of limiting behaviors of of cameras here uh so it's I don't know I can't help but think about that here Fusion is is really the solution to this so uh good high quality Sensor Fusion between cameras lar rtk we have a uh webinar sponsored by GPS world and geonet uh next week June 27th um and it'll talk about this exact topic the the fusion of high Precision um inertial navigation GPS and lar together for autonomous applications uh several years out Mike is geonet a public company or a private company where the value has accured to

the token well it's definitely everything that we're doing is to acove Value to the Token we are focused on full decentralization so I hope by mid 2025 if not sooner the protocol is entirely decentralized um this is something that's unique for geonet in the Deep In Space the centralized element is not necessary um the the way that the data is is relayed to customers the way it's validated and verified all this can be done in a fully decentralized fashion and that's 100% the goal of the project is to have a completely permission decentralized protocol for uh producing verified High accurate locations yeah Chris on that deep inside at coin fund there what do you think is the Catalyst that's going to make deepen like trying

to think of a fancy way for saying dein tokens go up um in the same way that like um you know the some of the AI coins whether it's like a render C like the thing that probably like moved the needle there the Catalyst was AI boom Chad gbt gbt 3 then four then Nvidia stock goes up and then that something like that kind of moves some of these AI coins like do you do you have a sense of what that's going to be for for deepin you know I don't know if you need a massive pump you know in the near term um you know I I think with many of these projects they're delivering real utility and value and and maybe you're not going to see an immediate pump and you know you're going to have a season maybe you will um but I think we look at longterm

like long-term utility long-term value and to the extent that you're doing something unique you're driving you know users to your platform people that need that data um that's going to that's going to create a flywheel a community will build and I think you know we're always focused over the long term um so so what do you look at you look at number of devices that are sold you know how how quickly is that accelerating how quickly is coverage accelerating you know where is demand like like demand is going to drive value um and if they're providing real utility um that's where you're going to see the long-term value acrel um so I I don't you know are we going to have a a deep in season probably at one of these points we're going to cycle

around and say okay uh we're done with the mother token let's move over to the Deep let's move over to deep in guys um but that's not really what we're focusing on we're talking we're really focusing on long-term value creation maybe just to play Devil's Advocate I mean obviously from my perspective much like you Chris I show the same view um but what could derail the entire project like what are some of the risks that you foresee I mean a lot of times in crypto you know people focus so much on price and that oftentimes you know can be distracting but I'm curious Mike or Chris um what do you guys see as major risks uh for the protocol for the continued growth of the network uh I mean I'm just kind of curious from your

perspective well my perspective is that um we've kind of passed through a lot of core risks that that we feel we've put behind us um and so that's exciting but certainly polit broad political instability is certainly a danger um it is uh you know which would influence potentially the regulatory climate um in in ways for crypto and for deep in and infrastructure in general um we're about connecting things together and to the extent that the governments of the world decide to tear things apart um and uh you know bomb each other into Oblivion that's just bad for everybody right that's at the top of my list actually of you know risks is just broad

geopolitical instability seems uh it's great for Bitcoin not sure it's as great for deepen uh but it it is it is a worry that I have every day um I think proing continuing to you know solve this problem of making sure that we we get to the hurdle where people see deep in and the the web two side um as a long-term solution is is is super important that it gets that brand uh credibility that this is something like you know ethereum salana Bitcoin that this is this these types of Technologies I don't think anyone questions are here to stay I think that will be broadly helpful for all the deepend projects when that occurs and if it doesn't occur it could

be broadly um harmful to um the projects um so those are those are the the top two in terms of getting a a deep in um you know summer to happen I think that the projects go back to Yo's uh comment about Community I think that that's something that has really lacked in the deepen industry and lack of community um I think we're as much to blame as any project you know it's something we need to work on um so Lana is organizing uh you know some some events to help try to bring deepen Founders across the different chains together to talk about how to improve the efforts of community and learn from

some of the other players and ecosystem on how they've done community and we're certainly going to participate in that I think it's an important element that's missing to um that that has been there um that has been there think about uh towo as a token render I think these things have done a better job at creating that Community sentiment than deepen uh projects have done and so that's something that I think my opinion that is the missing in ingredient to to Really um get the web three side Catalyst going is that lack of community with in the Deep In Space Mike what what chain are you guys built on we're built on polygon um so uh we picked polygon in 2022 it's been very reliable and stable

solution for us we are looking um we there is a bridge token on the iotech we've participated a lot with iotech and I think they have a very good view of real world applications and doing a lot of great things in deepend but we're open-minded to um uh how to scale the solution going forward um and do think that that Community aspect is one that we have to you know listen to uh carefully uh to and ties into I think the the the chains that are supported with giet would you ever consider leaving polygon to go to another chain simply because there's a different Community there's a community that's better somewhere else and that has not with with zero regard to the to the

technical side of things um well I don't think you can ever go zero zero regard to the technical side of things because that's an important yeah yeah but assuming that's not a factor assuming all solutions are equal yes absolutely I think go back to your comment um earlier I think that's one of the most important comments from uh that that that we've talked about is the community element isn't there and deepen in a strong way um like it is in some of the other elements of crypto and this must be solved um and so whatever that solution is we're open-minded to and we have to you know I I talked to Santi I talked to others like how do I solve it I don't I don't know all the answers this is not my you know you what what everybody has things are good at and I it's not my

personal expertise um so we're we're we're looking to add to our team we're looking to um broaden our Horizons but we think it's critical we think it's critical deep in projects work together a little bit more everybody kind of has their bespoke thing there's some animosity even between some of the projects that I think is completely unnecessary and totally counterproductive and to the ENT that you know we haven't been perfect on community I you know we want to improve on that we see that as as key to uh growing the the Deep whole deep in space we do it together nice I mean putting dents aside Mike Chris to your point on the long term even if you were to stay on polygon not move to

salana if you continue to roll out and you get coverage that no other traditional company's ever gotten and and you continue to go to Industry conferences and you let the crypto dents do their own thing and maybe punt shitcoins or whatever I mean at some point you know the Market's sort of like a voting machine in near term weighing machine in the long term kind of thing um like you're providing real utility like as it relates to a risk on the End customer like someone in agriculture or doing a game that's relying heavily on location based data or an Uber driver or a hive mapper you know per person that is like farming the token

like yeah we talk about Community it's important a lot but like we also hear like communities really like mercenary you know most air drops are are dumped immediately and so like I don't know like do you I I guess maybe more of an open question like is community really that important and what we think of community and crypto is very like short term and it's really not your customer anyways right I you're already getting usage most of the people that are using geonet like I don't know you tell me most of them are like not really Crypton native right they're like doing their thing and you know I appreciate like that the token

may not move or may not be appreciated because it's not in salana or whatever but like I don't know like I do Wonder like when you invest time in building Community I wouldn't say you don't have Community actually I would say you're the projects that perhaps has one of the most solid communities it's just not in crypto per se it's in your end customer which like which one do you want to have well I think you need both I think you run a risk if you um you know fall off the the the if deepen falls off the narrative um that you don't BR you don't get that um de facto solution where the

industry sees deepen as a as a long-term solution to infrastructure problems which I think it is and has extremely strong economics so there's a chance that you could do nothing with community and everything works great it's not a risk I want to take it's a it's a I think you it's the best to do to do both and to have both sides be very strong we're really a marriage of web two and web three and marriage involves you know compromise and and working together so the web two and the web 3 need to work together Harmon harmoniously to deliver um to unlock all this value so we've heard back you know some of the things that Yano pointed out we you know try to drive up the number of people who are

able to participate and from the web3 side and and the geonet ecosystem and those are things that we're we're we're working on um if it didn't happen what it still work it might you know it might very well uh there's there's very powerful unit economics and what we're doing the fact that we've been able to get to the world's largest Network um with the capitalization that that's been put into the project to date um from an investment point of view is is absolutely stunning it's absolutely stunning and so uh yeah there's a a awful lot of momentum on the web two side that can probably um carry the day but I don't think that's the way to do it I think like I said deep in will do much better and can be a much bigger pie

um if the community is there and if the projects work together in a way to unlock value for um these things and I think web will come around we're going to do a huge Presence at the 2025 CES um because we have a lot of different you know consumer electronics Partners now both at the chipset level and at the device level who are working with geonet we want to really uh frame um that it you know that that whole thing and bring more and more web two people in and trying to do that in a way that not only highlights geonet but also highlights deepen as a whole um we think that that with CES for example I think is a perfect place to do that marriage between web to and web three for the deep in community Mike man I think that's all I

got Chris Mike anything that we that we missed here that you guys wanted to cover or Santi no I mean Chris I I didn't hear Chris like uh like risks or things that you were worried about maybe just not junit but just deep it in general like you know like yeah I mean Mike you're sort of alluded to this like if the price collapses to a point where like no like you sort of lose interest or just becomes uneconomical for people but I think like supply and demand sort of usually takes care of these things if it's an efficient market but Chris I don't know if you were to add something to like the risks that you guys are or from your standpoint yeah like what what's the benefit of this project again I go back to utility and solving a real world need

right I think the biggest risk is if there's somebody who's able to figure it out cheaper and better and faster um I don't I gotten to know Mike well enough that the guy lives on The Cutting Edge of Academia he knows every single Innovation that that that's being done um within universities um you know he talked about some of the advancements he's looking at with Leos so um I feel pretty good about this founder um but but to me it's like okay what happens if somebody builds a better Mouse trrap in time um but gosh um incredible Head Start look what they've accomplished largest rtk Network in the world in in a very short period of time like really leveraging the power of deepin right like like using those tokens to

incentivize behaviors that would would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars and effectively been impossible without this technology um so that that's kind of what I'm thinking about Mike Chris appreciate the time guys thank you y thank you you guys thanks for having us on [Music]