The Great Migration: Why are so many DePINs moving to peaq? - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2024

hello everyone thanks so much for being here I'm Alex Barry I lead protocol Partnerships at misari and today we have about 30 minutes to talk about two key themes specific to deepin First is around migration and second is around this concept of physical Hardware versus purely digital so with that I'll quickly introduce our PR our panelists and we'll Dive Right In so with us today we have Jeff Outlaw cxo of yam which is a dpin delivering AAA quality gaming to any device with low latency and cost efficiency they effectively are paying gaming rig owners for their unused Cycles creating a passive income stream next we have Brent who is the co-founder and CEO of map metrics which is a decentralized gamified navigation app rewarding users for contributing map data focusing on privacy and transparency and last but not least we have SIM co-founder CTO of farm sent which is streamlining agricultural Supply chains connecting farmers and businesses directly thank you all for being here thank you for having us all right so with the first point major theme around migration what were some of the key factors that led to your specific projects to migrate right this is a massive decision would love to understand what that light bulb moment was for each of you yeah I'll start I guess um so for us we wanted to you know when we looked at uh what the deepin um industry really needs we thought Focus was a very important piece right there there are so much technology that's being built but having the uh Partnerships with other deep in projects because ours won't stand alone we'll be part ING with other deepend projects and having a single chain that takes the best of the technology and puts it into one place and doesn't fractionalize the focus was very important to us and that's kind of what led us to make the our change um for us uh tons of reasons to be honest um I think the most thing like the network effect is I think a very big one um but what I like the most about uh peak in general like they're really really deep in Focus like there are the change out there that are focused on deep in but not as Peak does it like they really like they come with features that are really relevant for us uh like for example the the machine ID which is massive because we really need to kind of like where is the data coming from so we really have to verify that it's coming from a machine that's kind of like core for deep in and also for the future very very needed to to kind of like grow the space and like in general like um we what we were looking for was uh a chain that was that is um cheap trans transactions very fast transaction and super reliable with the main focus on deep in um that's because what we building is a navigation app where people can update all their metadata and we need to reward them all the time so if we have don't have this as a kind of like Baseline we cannot go ahead and this is kind of like the main core thing that Peak really really stands for which is awesome and all the other stuff that I just mentioned yeah I'll take it from a different angle I feel like we've seen this trans ition towards a zero marginal cost Society in this internet age right now we're with web 3 we're going to a negative marginal cost Society where we pay the users and incentivize the users to actually participate right so let's imagine we have Farmers as Farm Cent we have a bunch of Revenue coming from the profits we make from Commodities we use that to buy a sensor and we give it to a farmer who can't afford it he puts it into the ground that generates all this valuable environmental data that data gets fed into map metrics and then then is useful to a bunch of stakeholders that data then is fed into our supply chain that supply chain data then ends up with uh the consumer who's willing to pay extra because they're getting all this extra value now that's a big value Dynamo that all connects together and something like Peak is so pivotal because it just makes it modular for us to click in all of these value models right so as new value models come along we can increase the amount of value that we can add to each user and what what I really loved was the idea of sharing the abundance of the machine economy because the world is becoming more digitized and we're moving into this new economy the machine economy and we don't want to leave the humans behind and for Peak with Peak that's just seamless well said one thing that I wanted to touch on was this concept of switching costs and opportunity cost right so typically whenever making a very meaningful decision you don't have the full picture you don't have all of the data so very curious for each of you what were some of the unknowns that you had um to kind of think through with your teams think through on behalf of your users when you were deciding to migrate and how did you underwrite those unknowns yeah it's it's the same as I guess you do with any kind of due diligence right when you're moving into a space that you don't know you want to try to find out as much about not just the technology but the people behind it so we had a lot of meetings with with the guys from Peak to find out you know what was their philosophy about having this focus on only on deepin and why is that uh philosophy there talked about the idea that you know by in our case right what we're doing is we're having people who have gaming rigs put their rigs on our Network and then we pay them passive income so when we talked the very first time about the idea that we can decentralize revenue and put Revenue into local economies in a much more efficient way than you would do with a Central model I spoke to Again part of our EOS you know gaming is a uh it's an exciting space to be in it's you know I've been doing it for a long time and uh it reaches a lot of people it's a it's a to be a$ 400 billion doll industry you know by 2030 so a lot taking that revenue and putting that kind of Revenue out in local economies was super important to us we we talked to them about that idea it was super helpful um and then again the idea that we're partnered with another Pro with so many other projects when we come up with a feature that we need we feel like we can go to the other teams and say you guys feel like you need this feature as well and then again we can influence the building of the chain and the technology as a group effort because we all have the same focus of of putting out a deep thing so the question was the migration cost right like how much uh like the struggle yeah so how you think through the switching costs and then also if there were any particular unknowns that you know you kind of had to underwrite in a specific manner to then all right this is the best Direction forward for our project got it no it's it's intense it really is so like don't underestimate it switching change especially we are not coming from an evm system so that was maybe kind of like something that we should have think about before but like fair enough so we not coming from an evm so for us it was even more difficult but um the change is massive it really is because we're not talking about just swapping a chain one of the other right what like you integrated in your software you integrated into your Hardware in your back end in like the chain itself it's like it's so complex every like if you change it in one of those sectors you have to change all of it so for us it was a huge undertaking and also like if there are any kind of like starting projects out here really kind of like look into which chain you are using like which one is fitting your project best because as soon you have to switch it's it's a massive undertaking and like every blockchain has their own spe uh specialities so for example with Peak is like perfect for deep in so if you're into deep in I would definitely consider like looking into that because it's it's um it's it's not it's not a lot of fund who change from chain yeah for us it was much easier uh we started as a Marketplace to connect farmers and uh the wholesalers as soon as the dpin idea came along we realized okay we just make that shift we spoke to our community uh they've always stood behind us and they're very flexible in their way of doing it so we we were early enough that we didn't have those issues is pretty seamless makes sense pivoting slightly let's talk about long-term incentive mechanisms so one thing that we aim to do and solve for at misari within our research is identifying signal in the market and then also being able to delineate between what is something that will be likely short-lived versus what is something that truly has a flywheel effect that you know should gain momentum over the long term and that's where you know the incentives truly matter so with that context looking ahead what are some of the long-term strategic benefits that you all see that you will be able to unlock one for your projects two for your users and really just long-term growth by migrating to Peak yeah sure um well what I I think besides like that the blockchain of peak is very solid um what I like is the projects that they attract kind of like if you look at like how to grow and let let not kind of like joke around we're we're facing web 2 we're fighting web 2 they're a beast so if we're all kind of like start as individual startups it's going to be very tough to take on the big guys but what I love with Peak is that they kind of like collect all those separate deepin projects and collectively we can actually build something way bigger so we can share data on the Chain like super super quick like frictionless like you can kind of like for example we we're building a navigation app we have a weather station we can put their data directly in our map we're building now a map for um Farm send um they need a location of their Farms they need a pin on the map they need to geolocate like their the area of the of the the hectars of land of those farmers and we can draw that on the map for them and visualize this for for um for their users and for the world to see so this is super cool because now they go on board on our grand program program and it's kind of like they don't have to go to the hosle to web to and be getting data from them as well together we can increase the value of the data because data together is enriching because it's not just one data point if you want to have valuable data you connect the dots that's why webt two is just so super powerful they they not collecting pieces of data and that's it that's how it like they make one big pile of data and they that's what how they use to project stuff like how to predict stuff like like the entire infrastructure of web 2 is is super powerful because I have our data and if we can manage to do this all together with web 3 there's a big chance that we can fight them yeah just to add to that I think the incentive mechanism for me personally is the impact that it creates in the real world right I think the idea of value in my mind and the way that we discuss it is how many lives can we improve and how much can we improve those lives right and the kind of long-term incentive is that if we can figure out a way to take this extremely digital Value World that we're building economy that we're building and make it digestible and implementable for the average person for a farmer in the middle of a field in Indonesia then that farmer is able to feed their children better and provide them a brighter future and those kids will then go build the bright future that we're all envisioning and I think that's the long form of this dpin infrastructure you know cuz we get lost in the weeds of that we got data we got info we got sensors we got all this stuff and the average person's like you're not speaking English yeah right yeah I agree that's it and as much as I love the everything for the farming because that's part of my background I again coming from the gaming side where we're supposed to be just about fun and the example that I use for the the end user um my son wants a new monitor for his computer I don't want to pay for a new monitor but if he can earn a new monitor by having his rig at night when he's you know in bed or when he's at school he can have his rig earning him the money every month that he's able to you know pull up and then spend to buy his new monitor I'm off the hook and uh we have a great use case for you know why it's valuable to have the gamer rigs on the network it's a win-win love that let's let's now pivot to the second theme um many of us have heard this concept that there's a spectrum where on one's hand we have the the P right the physical the hardware infrastructure and then the other end of that Spectrum we have purely digital so curious how do you all think about where a specific dpin falls on that Spectrum what are the implications for that user experience I know Sim you were just touching on that but would love to expand on that thought yeah I feel like we fall dead center on the physical to digital Spectrum on one side we're bringing this complex Digital World to the people in the physical who normally can't access it on the other side we're bringing the physical users to projects and and the digital world that actually is in need of those people but I I really feel like you know deepin is bringing sexy back because we've it's been beautiful being in this world where we just click buttons with dogs with hats on them and make a bunch of money and get a bunch of users but actually don't have very much impact in people's lives nobody's complaining about that but now it's time to swing the pendulum towards the PE where we take all of these digital value mechanisms and Powerful Technologies and put them in the hands of the people that are literally growing our food that actually feed our families that sustain us so we're dead center yeah I would say for us again we um the gaming space you've got the physical devices and the Xbox PlayStations your PCS and you've got the uh the service of providing a game to people so I think that we're also we see ourselves in the middle we're a new deliver system we use gaming rigs to replace the Xbox and the PlayStations and again they're all available to to people um but we're Al we're also a service not just for the game player because you know getting a game to go on a website super helpful you can have access to more games if you have a lower NPC but for the game developers themselves right the game developing industry is looking for ways to get their content out to more people in a at a cheaper way so those gaming developers now have a new system or will have a new system to distribute their their um distribute easier to more people and again this is something that the game industry is really looking for and we hope to you know what we do for them expand their industry cool yeah um I think it really depends on the project itself obviously but um the main goal of the game of web 3 should be more to have an interface compatible we with web 2 because I think if the bridge between web 2 and web 3 is too complicated then people will not migrate so we have seen like a lot that that it's friction that actually stops people from coming over like things are too complicated we now see for example wallets you don't need your keys anymore it's way like you can just log in like what Peak is now doing with the particle like you can just log in with your email and then you have a wallet in the background and then that that's stuff that we need in web 3 so like the same goes with the hardware if uh what we do for example right now um if we have the app we fire up the hardware and it's connected via Bluetooth it's just the only thing what you need to do is is turn on the hardware in this point it's the same as the connecting your headphones so then the friction is gone but as soon you have to go to your router and you have to uh disconnect port number zero or whatever and then you have to go into the technical stuff I believe that's why you use uh lose your users so to onboard as many and going for the mass adoption I think that we should look into the interface and usability of both the hardware and the and the and the software makes sense let's double down on scaling with physical infrastructure for a moment we had a talk earlier backstage um would love for you to share a little bit to the audience about how you guys are actually building the hardware as I understand it your brother is the one that that is building it I met him the other night very interesting guy very bright um so so maybe we'll start with you Brent how the team thinks through scaling um especially when as you mentioned you're competing against web 2 which they have all the infrastructure they have the supply chain right they've been doing this for decades would love to unpack that yeah sure um so there like there's several components right so SCA scaling as a project itself and scaling the hardware Sals so how are we going to scale as a project ourselves we cannot just go in and just like here's our hardware and just buy and it's going to be awesome so what we have done is we have two tier system we have the first tier is that you have the app for free and you can earn for free so everybody can just download it and can use it to the Maxs because we also don't want use it will not be able to use the app because that's not our goal our goal is not to get much money out of hardware sales or whatever but what we what we want to do is getting as many users getting value back for the data um the reason why we have the hardware and it's a very important one is that what we see in the future if something becomes valuable people will find a way to get to take advantage of this so for example if we just have the app and we have talked about this before if you look at Twitter or X um you see a lot of bots integrate like they they attacking kind of like Twitter and they just um share messages or whatever they all kind of like comes from foam Farms they have ai integrated they behave like people and they can just share data anonymously over the web and what can happen if this kind of uh Pham Farms integrate uh or in in intervene with your project and they massively install all your apps um they can just share you fake data and withdraw your liquidity pool so you give money for free for fake data and nobody wins here except for the mining farms and that's where the hardware comes in because it can protect your data it's all encrypted in the hardware so that's why for us as a project Hardware is very uh valuable and and the manufacturing and the scaling U what we've done we have designed and done everything in the in the nellens we have a very clever guy our CTO and um he has developed everything and the the firmware the hardware he like he kind of like created the whole whole shebang and then he just sent over the blueprints to the factory in China and they kind of like Mass produce it but the the benefit from this as well is that you can massively scale so you can just go from one to two factories or three factories so quite like that wise like I mean then scaling is quite a little bit easier sorry I I'd love that we're having this discussion because I feel like we have a special privilege in this space uh because we are a Marketplace connecting Farmers with wholesalers cutting out the middleman we have insane margins in between so the model is built so that 10% of the value the profits from each transactions would stay in the token which gives us consistent liquidity coming from commodity trading which as commodity prices go higher and higher becomes even more and more profitable that funding is what will allow us to fund the actual infrastructure ahead of time because it's it's a known fact that if as soon as you get into the physical infrastructure somebody's got to pay for it so we're happy to take that cost up front at the same time the like for example Indonesia we found that trying to onboard users doesn't work all you have to do is go to a village and show one person how to make money by putting this thing in the ground and the virality of that everybody in the village wants to do it and then the next Village and the next Village so onboarding the users happens through that the funding of the infrastructure happens from a real world value model that's becoming more and more valuable and then the complexity in between we just get a bunch of bright Minds in the room like us and we figure it all out and we got all our brothers involved exactly yeah for us the Harware side was to find a a partner who was already uh in the space buil our our note is essentially a hard drive drive it's an external hard drive so as we approached hard drive manufacturers and some of the biggest in the world when we went through what we're building they got very excited because they saw the opportunity to take that device and put it on to uh any any site where you would go to order your computer your home Fe gaming computer if you just add this into your package then you you can see you can very easily calculate how quickly from the your earnings you've paid off the computer that you just bought so them it was very exciting so they wanted to move into place quickly we've we've got plans to make sure that that happens um so that's that's how we approach the hardware uh sector of it and again it's essential for our growth we know that um when we looked at the amount of gaming nodes that we do it would take to run say Call of Duty which is you know fairly popular game um our estimates were somewhere around the area 200,000 nodes around the world to to run that kind of game so Ian you couldn't put all of or we wouldn't expect to have all the users of Call of Duty be on our network but that gives you a sense of the scale that we have to grow out to so scaling out it we know it's a challenge but again the gaming space is a it's it's an immediate win when you take those kinds of devices and and in some of the projects we're speaking to about going on to their Network branding the nodes for their gaming projects is just another way for them to get their their brand out there they want to take advantage of that and that's something also what we're looking at Super interesting and and to double click into this for a moment how are you guys communicating because the amount of work that goes into this is very different than most other verticals within crypto so I'd have to imagine that as you continue to scale as you continue to ramp up you're effectively building this moat on the physical side whether you're doing it in house or whether you're Outsourcing to a third party that now you have a you know a really good relationship with how do you communicate all of that work to the general audience so that way they can understand now kind of looking at this from like an investment lens that this is a really interesting Mo that this new entrance you know they're going to have a CP years to catch up to this to this project yeah I don't know that in our case I don't know that I would necessarily go out to try to scare people and say we have to do all this stuff to make it happen because really to to their end we're about entertainment we want them to kind of ease themselves in easily and again our network is not the game player doesn't have to know anything about web 3 if the game is web 3 enabled that's great but it doesn't have to be um the only person really that's that's applied in the in the web 3 space for our network are the node operators the game developers don't have to understand web 3 at all too that's important to us because not every gaming um company wants to get into the web 3 space so I would say that uh um it's not even that hiding it necessarily we just don't think we're going to add that stress to the conversation it is really as simple as saying what we do is we create a we've created a network that's very similar to what you would find with YouTube in that you just take your stream your game stream and put on our Network and it reaches every website you'd want to cool um for us it's focusing on the on the obious what web3 comes with for example privacy if you think about navigation apps in general they kind of like they know exactly where they are they they they have all your data and they know who you are as a person I think that's the most uh dangerous part of this all whole kind of like web to um scenario so we can just kind of like tell our our audience like we're not just building a navigation app we're also looking at your privacy like you shouldn't your online data should not be connected with your offline personality so why do we need your credit card details and why do we know who you exactly are as a person while we're tracking data of you that can be separate that should be separate because data is like something on itself why why do we need a name attached to it you can still sell that we still have every all the other like metrics that we need to make it valuable but like that one that thing that web 2 has created like 20 30 years ago with attaching your person life with the online world that's that's something that we really really really have to kind of like Get rid of so that's uh yeah big selling point for us as well I think I feel like the world is creating our mode for us for Farm because it's been so interesting having this conversation of food Security in different with different stakeholders right we spoke to Indonesia and the moment we started the conversation the Ministries instantly opened the doors and said said okay if you can show us how to connect to these Global liquidity pipelines that are apparently being built uh we're happy to let you do whatever you like we went to uh the Middle Eastern countries which are so facing massive food security issues the moment we said we want to build pipelines to deliver the food and make it more seamless they opened all the doors we went to China and within a week they made us part of the belt and Road initiative we speak to Master Card and they're like you better the minimum we want you to deal with is 120 million because we see the value here right so as food security gets worse as the volatility in the world gets crazier as Supply chains start to get more and more unstable it's creating the demand and the need for what we're doing but at the same time we've had this discussion a lot of times where we've we've realized that we don't want to build the mod so competitors can't come along we've left the world of competition and we've enter the world of collaboration billions of people need to be fed we'd be happy to have other people use this exact infrastructure and come along you're not going to take anything from us in the process if anything we get the karma of knowing that we've been able to just feed more people and if you want to feed more people let's go feed more people right love that yeah it's not Zero Sum I had two last questions one just taking a step back for a moment we at misari have been very interested in deepin all the way from when we coin the term to now you look at today that there's a major L1 that's solely focused on deepin there's all of these really exciting projects building within this vertical for me personally one of the things that's Most Fascinating about it is it kind of removes a lot of like crypto is very esoteric right if you go to an event with non- crypto people and you talk to them about what you do it's a very interesting conversation and it's very humbling in most times so we've kind of touched on this but would love to just be very clear on if you can share with your you know your end users your customers how much does crypto actually come up in the conversation how much do they care about it versus them actually just solving the problem that you've built a solution for yeah so for the game developers we speak to there's nervousness because uh a lot of users have seen web three gaming not be what they wanted it to be or not be right so again we do take steps to say to them it doesn't have to have any kind of web through you don't have to touch web through at all just have an unreal project put on our Network so um yeah so again we we try to make sure that that it's not a conversation that they need to get into now again if they want to we can show them uh who our partners are to to you know put web three uh elements into their games but it's not something that we push on them at all um yeah I think that like now we're dealing with like a lot of early adapters so they're kind of like used already to the web fre space and if we talk about non- early adapters I think we shouldn't only focus on crypto itself it's more kind of like visualize the value of data and you can do that in many other ways but it needs to be on the blockchain chain to make sure everything is secure so um you could also give away discounts or what we doing we're planting trees for example they can use the crypto to do that so uh that's that's that's our goal to kind of like get both worlds together we do not mention the words crypto or blockchain to anybody except for this room right because it it it's like trying to tell somebody to use the Internet by saying make sure you use the https protocol they will instantly stop using it it's also because the the vast majority of the world is busy living their lives and Technology confuses them they just want to know where do I click and how do I improve my life and my loved ones' life how do I feed my family and how does it hit my wallet if if that so we definitely don't don't use that but we do use language like value I think crypto is the biggest value generation mechanism that's going to happen over the next 100 years and if we speak from it from a place of value from improving lives from feeding families it'll be seamless in its adoption love that that is why deepin is the frontier we have about 30 seconds left let's end with this rapid fire what's something that's on the road map that you are most excited about that you'd like to share with the audience yeah moving into the retail space with the listing I'm going to put the first sensor into my garden and we're going to start generating the data and actually we're going to take you along the Journey of how it happens so please join amazing awesome well excited follow along each of your teams and projects thanks so much for your time today thanks everyone thanks