How DePIN Will Onboard the Masses Into Web3 | Tyler Boscolo

[Music] what's going on everyone okay full transparency I don't know if I can follow up as cool as a bus on Wheels where you get to work remotely but I will do my absolute best so for for those uh who probably don't know me my name is Tyler uh I am the host of the unleashing deepin podcast and so deepin is something that's fairly near and dear to my heart uh I've been in this space since about 2017 started working in decentralized identity I work now at a company called thrum which is sort of deep and adjacent all that to say I was very jaded coming into what is now considered deepen as a result of the Ico craze defi summer nfts you name it so hopefully that'll set the stage for what I'm talking about is something I actually do believe in quite uh quite wholeheartedly but I'd love to start with a question which is who has heard this statement before we are trying to onboard the next billion users into web 3 have you heard that we've all heard that okay so I have a thesis I think that deepin will be the Catalyst for for driving the next billion users into web 3 and so what I want to talk about today are three topics first of all the value of deepen why I think the model is so Prime for onboarding a billion users into the space and then I want to go through three real world use cases or or case studies if you will for projects that are actually growing really fast and doing some interesting stuff uh in the space so I'll start with what the heck is deep in anyway uh our friend Sammy who's over at misari actually coined the term we're kind of rolling around with different names but we landed on what is called Deep in now and that is decentralized physical infrastructure networks and so there are quite a few different implementations of of this deepen model in in different areas where I started off was Wireless that was what interested me the most if you're familiar with projects like helium uh that's sort of dominated the narrative in the wireless space but then there's been other projects like filecoin CIA coin etc etc and so deepen spans far greater than just Wireless there's a lot of interesting sectors if you will that are very receptive to this type of deep and model and so what makes deepen interesting is this what I call the deepen fly will actually I didn't coin this term but this is sort of what we've come to call and so it sort of revolves around this concept of users individual contributors deploying Hardware physical infrastructure who are then compensated in a network token and then it sort of drives this flywheel effect where where you've got the demand side because you can actually incentivize deployments but then you also can solve the supply side by bringing in users who can then be compensated in in the network token as well and so for those who maybe go back back to the 2017 2018 days if you remember Chris berinsky had his famous MV equals PQ model I'm going to be honest with you I I went to school for finance and I couldn't fully wrap my head around how that was going to translate in some of these real world applications but we're seeing that take place in deep and in real time which is which is really kind of exciting and so um speaking of CA which is one of the sort of the decentralized compute excuse me the decentralized storage projects that predated this deepen term um their founder is doing another project in the space his name is David and and one of the things that he said on our podcast a couple weeks ago was owning a token binds people together in a way that owning stock or donating to a charity doesn't and so tokens have this really fascinating way of building community in ways that you just don't get through other kinds of mediums and so you can leverage that Within These decentralized physical infrastructure networks to satisfy both the supply and the demand side and kind of a new and novel way and so some of those really unique value props that are specific to deepen is that solves the cold start problem first and foremost you're able to actually get users on both the supply and the demand side by compensating them or sort of incentivizing them if you will with this network token the other thing is that it allows you to scale faster than ever and some of the use cases that I'm going to talk about today really showcase the scalability that's sort of made possible by this deepen narrative that wasn't with their web2 counterparts or sort of competitors it allows you to deploy Hardware at scale dramatically faster while not even considering the ridiculous amounts of capex if you're looking at things like Wireless projects companies like Verizon AT&T they spend billions of dollars trying to deploy hardware and the reality is the deepen model enables that to happen so much faster and in a medium that actually captures value to those those deployers and the other thing is that it democratizes value and so users that are on the supply side they're using the network they're actually able to get what would otherwise be something that sort of flows to the top where Verizon and AT&T for example they really take everything they they monit the heck out of the network and if you're not one of those big three Telos for example you're sort of out of luck and so these four unique value props really enable deepin to do things that you can't do in the web two space in just a fascinating way so said another way deepin powered networks sort of create this competitive advantage that becomes benefits to users who don't necessarily care about web 3 and so one of the things that I think is so exciting about this space is that it can get users in interfacing with things that they otherwise would on a day-to-day basis and sort of exchange that value with them and they can acrew that and and you just don't get that in the Legacy space so I want to walk through three case studies of projects that are deploying the deepen model scaling super quickly uh and getting quite a bit of success so the first one's helium if you've been in crypto for a while you've probably heard about helium uh they they started off by deploying what was called a luran network which is um sort of this high high range sort of low throughput uh Network that can be leveraged for things like iot sensors and a bunch of different use cases but specifically in the last year or so they rolled out what's called helium mobile and helium mobile is a a wireless network that's powered by the people and so I want to start with this this screenshot from Amir who's um the CEO of Nova Labs which is sort of the company behind helium mobile um don't quote me on this I'm fairly certain they've scaled their their uh mobile subscriber base faster than any Wireless project in history they've onboarded now 50 50,000 subscribers as of a few days ago which is which is pretty pretty incredible um and so the helium model works like this they sell hotpots to folks like us you plug those hotspots in they've I won't bore you with some of the technical details about the types of of network bandwidth that they're providing but the deployers who are actually out there providing this physical infrastructure get compensated in a speculative Network token for being a for for providing that and then off of that they sell phone plans to regular subscribers who can actually Roam and access on these networks without even skipping a Beat from there users who are actually participating in this ecosystem can do what's called mapping and functionally what they can do is they can use their phone just the way it's already working and provide valuable data back to helium mobile saying this place doesn't have good coverage this place has sufficient coverage and they can actually get compensated in the network token that they can then use to be able to buy more more data on the network they can actually use to pay for their phone plans and what it allows helium mobile to do is they can optimize it scales faster than ever seen before because they can take that real-time data and say we don't have coverage here that's sufficient we've got a lot of footfall high footfall traffic we need to incentivize that and so they can actually roll out boosted coverage zones so that deployers get more Network token and so the cycle sort of uh it just continues as they grow and grow and grow and so in addition to providing a a a network model that's that's quite scalable they're also building a better mouse trap so I don't know if this affected anybody in the last 24 hours or so but if you're an T&T customer you maybe know that your your cell phone service went down I won't speculate on why that was I don't think any of us quite know yet um but these decentralized networks in addition to being so valuable from from their scalability and their deployment strategy they're actually pretty um robust and they're they're immune to some of these problems that centralized systems are plagued by uh and so if you were a helium Mobile customer yesterday you likely did not experience the outage that some of the AT&T customers did so I use this example as you never forget your first so my fiance uh couldn't care less about crypto she's never owned crypto never really planned on owning crypto um but she signed up for helium Mobile's plan because their uh their offer to customers in certain areas is as low as $5 a month and so for her it's just basic math I need a phone plan and I don't want to pay the $70 that she was paying before T-Mobile so she signed up for helium mobile and as a part of that was able to opt into the mapping and so now she's a customer of the network and she's actually getting compensated in crypto in a way that she probably would never have been had it not been for this deep in model so now all of a sudden you've got who I'd like to call a regular web 2 customers who don't care they don't know but now she's actually getting crypto she's involved in the ecosystem and then she can use that to pay her plan off which I think is so incredible because now all of a sudden we talk about onboarding these users into web 3 you're giving them the value propositions without all the cumbersome user experience problems or and it's really a a value exchange and something that they're already familiar with and they're they you need a mobile plan still so um so that's the first one that I want to talk about the second one is a really interesting uh company that I got to have on the podcast called cencio and so they're doing something that I wasn't aware of beforehand which is noise pollution mapping um another thing I didn't know it's it's a big problem uh there is about a hundred billion dollars in sort of costs whether you think about it from a hotel or a restaurant that's sort of associated with this noise pollution and so their model is so brilliant and it uses deep into power this which is users download an app they use the microphone on their device to be able to provide noise data that that cencio can turn around and sell to companies like Expedia or companies like Hotel providers or open table and then they can use that data is an exchange that flows back to the users um and so I talk about Lightning Fast growth that's sort of enabled with this deepin narrative so they were able to scale their user base to over 100,000 users in about 6 months which is pretty good uh and the other thing is that a lot of these users were firsttime crypto users right they never actually had a wallet they didn't know much about crypto but all of a sudden they think hey I can start earning passive income from my phone because I just download this app I let it use the the microphone it's all secured they don't actually track any audio or video they're just using the deciel ratings and in six months and this is where the other power of deepen comes into play they were able to collect more noise data in 6 months than sort of the web 2 competitor had done in 15 years and so when I had the founders of the of the project on my podcast they said that would not be possible without deep in and I fully uh I would fully agree with them on on that and so the last case study that I'd like to share with you is something um that I also didn't know was was sort of a a business case or a problem and it's a company called Wing bits and what they're providing is community powerered flight tracking so what's interesting about flight tracking is it it is actually it's very regulated but it's sort of this Community Driven thing thing where people that are pilots or they Aviation enthusiasts they actually set up these Hardwares and they provide a lot of the tracking data that that gets bought and used by Delta or by Boeing um Boeing is a big buyer of these these flight tracking data and so uh the companies that would sort of facilitate this data aggregation would actually allow people who are deploying Hardware to get access to it is sort of the reward for being a part of the network but we know about rug Poes in web 3 these users got sort of rug pulled in the web two-way and so um that company got acquired by either a private Equity or Venture Capital firm I don't know the specifics and basically they changed the incentive model where it was no longer uh all that data that they were previously having access to was no longer the case and so with those changes there was a dramatic disconnect from the network because a lot of users who were excited about this said I don't want to participate because it's no longer valuable so silencio or excuse me Wing bits came in with deep in and and what they were able to do is in 3 months they were able to deploy more of these stations that were tracking flight data than the than this web 2 company was able to do in the first three years of business and that just really goes back to talk about the power of this model where you can incentivize both the demand and the supply side and you you build Network participation in a way that just wasn't possible before and so for all these reasons I think that deepin is going to be primed as a as a catalyst for onboarding billions of users into the space because they get access to something that just wasn't crypto native before and it's solving problems that that they don't have to know and or care about to be able to get access to so um I'll do my quick shill if you're interested in learning more about deep in projects I've had a chance to interview a lot of the really great ones on my podcast it's called unleashing deepin um these are a few that came to mind that I wanted to make sure you got a chance to uh to take a look at xnet they're building basically um decentralized Wireless that can can be roamed on to by companies like AT&T foam is sort of a GPS competitor GPS is pretty inaccurate and also quite Antiquated uh and so they're doing some interesting things there Hive mapper is a is a project that's basically creating uh they're they're using Dash cans to collect mapping so if you think like Google Maps and some of these companies that's done by very Capital expensive uh and very centralized companies and so um there's a lot of them here Peak which is like an L1 for for deep in uh is is another one they came to mind so now I've got my other shill with with some handles if you want to check anything out I'd love to do it and I see a hand I've got six minutes so I'm happy to answer a few questions test test okay cool I'll stop yelling like a crazy guy Okay so um I get the flywheel you know what I what I see though is like a lot of cell pressure right and we could have a reflexive spiral that the token goes down subsequently they're not incentivized to run the infra Etc where is the buy pressure coming from to make these like net sustainable that's a great question um the token economic model I think is something that still has work to do we've seen some big players come in and frankly the big players that have gotten a lot of success you can see a lot of times where it's subsidized by lots and lots of enture capital money and so there is definitely a balancing act in every in every Network model it's a little bit different so if you're looking at Wireless like I'll use a company like xnet for example they're very intentional about where their deployments go and so the way the token model works is that companies that actually buy data they burn it with the network token and so if you don't have that buy burn mechanism in place the flywheel to your point will fully collapse and so it's something that has to be very intentionally built um companies like xnet for example are ones that I think are doing it right uh demos and another project that I think is quite interesting they haven't begun to monetize on the data side what they basically do is is you get a a a dongle for your car and it collects the data that you can get access to track it in real time and then from there D data companies that are interested in buying and leveraging that data can be able to do that and so you need the proper buy bur mechanisms in place uh I I think we're early days in terms of seeing what the right model is because we've yet to have um sort of the cat the catastrophic collapse like a teruna style event within the space that will happen there's no question about it um but the reality is we we definitely are are in sort of early days we're seeing that the data burn side needs to come to fruition to be able to offset some of that by pressure that you're referencing because it is a real thing any other questions no cool well I guess I can wrap it up a little bit early and yield some time back to everybody so if you do get a chance I'd love for you to take a listen to the Pod like I said I've got some pretty incredible Founders that have come on to chat um I'm really passionate I said I was Jaded by the last like three cycles and this is one of those that I don't feel so Jaded by so uh I think there's there's some some hope and and quite a bit of opportunity here okay few more questions uh favorite episode would be the xnet one I I feel like I learned more on that podcast episode about Wireless I'm kind of a wireless geek my day job is Wireless adjacent so um that one I he rich is a fascinating individual he ran the Google Venture the Google X which is sort of the Venture arm of Google for a while uh and he did some crazy moonshop projects there and so hearing about his learnings and expectations the other one that I would say is the glow episode so that was the founder of of CA as I mentioned and so his lessons learned he was in deep in before we even called it deep in uh he's got some some interesting learnings that they're applying to what they're doing and and glow for references is a solar farm generation project with a carbon credit component and so they're really trying to weed out all the BS and the carbon credits by sort of incentivizing solar Farms to be deployed uh and and pump that power pump that energy back into the grid that's again uh uses the the token mechanism there so anything else I'll be right over here I'd love to chat with everybody or anybody that has any further questions one of my most bullish on that I'm not seeing built God that's a good question so there's some interesting things in the Privacy space that's starting to happen I'm going to plead some ignorance on here or here with with things like zks I'm you're starting to see uh conversations around how you can begin to sort of Ensure the decentralization through hardware and other mechanisms and again I'm going to plead ignorance on but it's one of the spaces that because I don't know a lot about I'm pretty interested to see what opportunities come to fruition as a result of it so that would be one stock pick if you want that uh for for a sector that I think's going to have some interesting growth cool all right well thank you so much everyone for coming I really appreciate it and uh I'll be over here if you have any questions