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#17 Monetizing your car's data with DIMO | POT: The Cryptocurrency Podcast
47 Plays9 months ago
Rob is the co-founder of DIMO, a blockchain-based IOT solution with a focus on making cars smarter. With DIMO, users can monetize their vehicle's data and access brand new features for their car.
The problem that DIMO have identified is that cars lag drastically behind in the realm of connectivity and smart technology.
Rob’s vision with DIMO is to bring the digital sophistication of smartphones to vehicles. By leveraging blockchain technology, DIMO aims to create a decentralized platform where cars of any make or model can establish a digital identity and interact seamlessly with a network of services and applications. This shift not only enhances the functionality available to car owners but also introduces new layers of efficiency and convenience that are currently missing from most automotive experiences.
Why Blockchain?
The automotive industry is highly fragmented with hundreds of manufacturers and service providers who operate in silos, making universal standards and cooperation challenging. Blockchain technology provides a neutral, decentralized ledger that can serve as a trusted repository of data accessible by various stakeholders without the need for intermediaries.
For vehicles, this means everything from secure, peer-to-peer car sharing services, smarter and more efficient insurance models, and even the ability to have cars autonomously perform tasks like parking and paying for their own parking fees. Essentially, blockchain can do for cars what the internet did for information — make it universally accessible and infinitely more useful.
The Role of DIMO in Vehicle Connectivity
DIMO acts as a catalyst in this transformation by offering both hardware and software solutions that allow vehicles to connect to its blockchain platform. The platform not only ensures that cars can communicate with each other and with different apps and services but also maintains robust security and privacy controls, allowing owners to control who gets access to their vehicle's data.
This connectivity is achieved through a combination of native integrations with vehicle manufacturers and universal devices that plug into a car's OBD (On-Board Diagnostics) port. These devices enable older vehicles, not just new models, to connect to DIMO's network, making the platform widely accessible.
A Peek Into the Future of Connected Vehicles
The potential applications of a fully integrated vehicle connectivity platform are vast. Imagine a world where your car not only drives you safely to your destination but also communicates with city infrastructure to find parking, negotiates traffic efficiently, and even makes service appointments. Or consider the possibilities in logistics and fleet management where every vehicle's location, condition, and availability are tracked in real time, with all data securely stored and shared on a blockchain.
Moreover, the data generated by these connected vehicles can be immensely valuable. By analyzing data on driving patterns, vehicle performance, and maintenance needs, companies can offer more personalized and cost-effective services, from insurance to repairs.
This podcast is fueled by Aesir, an Algorithmic cryptocurrency Trading Platform that I helped develop over the last 2 years that offers a unique set of features.
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Transcript
From Finance to Crypto: Rob's Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
What happens when an autonomous vehicle gets in an accident with another one? They have an autonomous driving system from one company, parts from another company, manufactured by a different company, maybe with an operator from another company sitting in the front and see who's at fault, what happened here? What's the equivalent of the black box inside of an airplane?
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Proof of Talk, the cryptocurrency podcast where we invite leaders and builders into the space to come on and talk about their experience in the industry as well as the projects and products that they've been building. My name is Andrei and I've been in the cryptocurrency space since 2017. I've also helped co-found algorithmic crypto trading platform Acier that enables users to quickly and easily automate their trades while managing the risk.
00:00:48
Speaker
I'm here today with Rob, who is the co-founder of Deemo. That's a blockchain-based IoT solution. How are you doing, Rob? I'm doing great. Great to talk to you. Yeah. Well, thanks for accepting my invitation, man. I think it's such a big idea, and I just want to break that down into smaller chunks. But I just want to start with how you initially got into crypto. It's a question I'd like to ask everyone, and it's always a different answer and a unique story behind that.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, it might be a different answer. I historically worked in finance and I worked in finance with, so the old CEO of Zappos was revitalizing downtown Vegas. I was working on that project, commercial real estate investing, small business. We were doing music festivals, schools, all kinds of stuff. And we were closely related to Zappos. I was doing finance there and we were implementing Holacracy there.
00:01:39
Speaker
Holacracy is this manager-less decentralized organization. There's no managers. You're the lead link of a circle. The circle is where work gets done. As the lead link, you're the bridge between the broader circle above you. You're kind of the boss. You end up being the boss. The idea was to try to make it more of a decentralized organization with more clear governance and all that.
00:02:04
Speaker
I think it's such a cool idea, but Holacracy ultimately is not ... I wouldn't recommend that to any company, especially any large company. A little bit incomplete, but I think there's things you can do. I still love this idea of decentralized organizations. As a finance person, you kind of see the inefficiency with the way that people transact across systems and records are kept and incentives are created, that kind of thing.
00:02:28
Speaker
And then when I came across Ethereum, it was really like that DAO use case and the supply chain use cases, identity and voting use cases where I was like, oh my God, this could really solve a lot of these like decentralized scalable org issues and be applied
Consensus and the Evolution of DAOs
00:02:41
Speaker
that way. So that's what got me into it. I started going to conferences, eventually crashed the Consensus Ethereal Conference, talked to a bunch of people there. I met some folks at some meetups. And then after bumping into them enough times, got a job interview.
00:02:56
Speaker
and worked at Consensus for four years. I was there 2017 to 2021, got to see a bunch of different eras of blockchain, like the ICO phase, the DeFi summer, CryptoKitties broke Ethereum for a little bit. It was cool to be there for all those different eras, see a lot of different things, and obviously a lot of things with email are modeled after the best things I saw from different projects while I was there.
00:03:18
Speaker
That's cool, man. That's super exciting. I feel like that was such a wild time for crypto for the Ethereum ecosystem. Like the ICO and just pre ICO era was absolutely nuts. I was actually speaking to one of the core, like former core Ethereum developers and the guy who was actually wrote a good chunk of the Dallas smart contract.
00:03:38
Speaker
And it was really interesting to kind of hear about how the DAO started, what it was supposed to be, what it ended up being. And also, Christoph is the guy's name. He also, in the meantime, he kind of changed his mind on the concept of DAOs. In his idea is that DAOs are the ideal form of a decentralized organization, but in many cases, they don't necessarily
00:04:03
Speaker
they're not accountable to the local law. So how do you bring that to a compliant regulatory, like a system that's compliant from a regulation standpoint? We still don't have an answer to that, but it's good that it gets people thinking, I guess. I think the regulatory side is actually a little bit easy. I don't think that's the biggest issue that DAOs face today. With Holacracy, with DAOs, I think one thing people forget about with decentralized organizations is
00:04:32
Speaker
You know, systems need to allocate resources effectively. They need to incentivize good behavior. They need to propagate information scalably. And that's why you have like a centralized, and whether it's a 15 person company or a 15 person village, you just can, like one person can run it. You know, like you guys do this, you guys do this, you guys do this. Make sure everyone's pulling their weight. Let's plan this out. You know, you can just kind of run things that way because there's not that much information the system's not, is, you know, maybe not scalable, but it's manageable.
00:05:01
Speaker
The issue comes when you're this big distributed thing, and you think about what's the most effective decentralized system we have. A city, an economy, that's a decentralized system that produces things. You think about what is New York City but a large company that produces nightlife and financial services and so on and so forth, and it's not centrally planned. What makes that possible is the profit incentive, court systems, contracts,
00:05:31
Speaker
currency that you can use as a medium exchange that, that, you know, creates right incentives. So I think with, with dows, with Holacracy, uh, to make them more effective at producing whatever it is we're trying to produce. A lot of times that's what it is. A lot of dows are kind of the hallmark of the early down movements. So it's just like everybody get in here, join the discord thousands of us. We're all equal. We all just vote with our tokens or vote with our, you know, one person, one vote or token weighted voting.
00:05:58
Speaker
And do you have an incentive to vote? No, not really, unless you think it's really cool. Do you have incentive to be like an expert on all things and you have to speed and ready to vote on everything? No, not really. And a city, if you try to operate that way, wouldn't work either, right? So anyway, I'd love to see things shift. That was, yeah.
00:06:15
Speaker
That was a lot of what I worked on at Consensus. You can tell I still love the decentralized org design and efficient systems stuff. I expect big things in the future. We're still not quite there yet. No, I love thinking about those things. I think they're really fascinating. I think governance, whether you're talking governance for a project or governance for a country or whatever, it's super interesting. I actually have this idea that I think the current
00:06:42
Speaker
kind of governance system in most countries is broken because people are in charge of systems and processes and people are corruptible. And I'm probably not the only one to mention it, but just think about having a sort of kind of like a centralized or a distributed intelligence that can kind of
00:07:01
Speaker
make decisions based on what everyone thinks, to have true decentralized governments. I've been toying with that idea for a while. I'd love to see a simulation of it on a computer or something to see what's going to happen if you just let an AI make the decisions based on what people want. I'd love to see that simulation too. There's always that when you add the human element to it, what happens. But yeah, that'd be cool.
00:07:25
Speaker
So anyway, then you've had consensus and then you've moved from consensus, you co-founded demo. Right. Yeah, I had the chance for a while to start. And just being in consensus, there's opportunities to found other companies for a while. I was really picky about it.
00:07:40
Speaker
Not to sound like I'm trying to be so morally righteous, but there's so many projects where it's like the block, I think the blockchain element of it is it's kind of adjacent or somewhat unnecessary that the token is just kind of bolted on so you can have one. I think with demo, you should get into what what what demo is, but I can make the argument for why.
00:08:01
Speaker
demo really could not succeed without blockchain. It is a use case that adds a lot of value to the world that would not be nearly as good without blockchain. So I love the opportunity to kind of come in and work on something like that, where we're really not only are we doing something innovative and new that gives us an unfair advantage and a first mover advantage on it, but we're also kind of like displaying for the world what blockchains can be used for. And I think
00:08:28
Speaker
know, early internet, people could only really think email and like a catalog online. And it took people putting out video streaming. I mean, there's also like better bandwidth and whatever, but video streaming and
00:08:44
Speaker
and like ride hailing and other kinds of like applications that kind of like reshape people's minds as to what the internet could be used for. And now everyone's like, oh, just take this for granted. Of course, we'll have smartphones, we'll use all these apps and whatever, but people couldn't even imagine them 20 years ago. So I love the chance to be one of those use cases that kind of shows the world like why blockchains matter for more than just
00:09:05
Speaker
profile picture NFTs and money transfers, which are both great things, not discounting them at all. But people are not yet convinced that that is like, you know, on the same level as AI or electrification of vehicles or.
00:09:22
Speaker
rockets to Mars or
Connecting Cars: The Demo Platform
00:09:23
Speaker
whatever in terms of its technological importance and how profound and innovative it is. But I think it is. I think it is at that level. I think it's above that level maybe for some of those things in terms of what it'll do for society. So yeah, time to show it. Yeah.
00:09:36
Speaker
I mean, I think it's just, it's a really new technology, right? And that is always the challenge of a new technology. You have NFTs, which are mainly being used right now for art. Now the art market itself is really tiny, right? I work in the art sector. It's a, God, I don't want to say the wrong number, but it's like two or $3 billion business a year, like industry year. No, sorry.
00:09:59
Speaker
the number
00:10:17
Speaker
diving deeper into an already sub-niche, of course it's not going to have mainstream attention. I think the real revolution is going to happen when people realize that we can use NFTs to create ticketing systems or items in games or just ownership of
00:10:36
Speaker
different devices, even physical devices, right? Because it's also kind of what you guys do at demo and kind of brings us into the way you use blockchain technology and crypto demo. So do you maybe want to just give a quick overview of the like high level idea and then we can just move into like the car, more like the car mechanics of it?
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So at Dima, we're building a open connected mobility platform for digitally and connected vehicles. So what does that mean? That doesn't usually land on people right away. I have to kind of explain it. Think about cars. Cars as a piece of mechanical hardware are some of the most perfected and advanced technology there is. You just roll to any gas station.
00:11:24
Speaker
Even the fuel pumps are pretty technologically savvy with knowing when to shut off. It goes into the fuel tank. Fuel pumps take that from your tank. They filter it, turn it into mist, inject it into the engine at just the right point, boom, whatever. Repeat that thousands of times a second or a minute for millions or hundreds of thousands of miles, mechanically so, so impressive.
00:11:52
Speaker
digitally, they're stuck in the era of the landline or flip phone, like cellular flip phone, in terms of how smart they are. People don't, really until you got a smartphone and got used to it, you didn't really think that there was much more you could do with a flip phone, so people still are in that mode with vehicles where they think,
00:12:13
Speaker
their current level of connectivity is enough. But usually for most people, it's like your connectivity is you have a remote that can unlock the car from five feet away. Now it's like as smart as your car is. And meanwhile, your doorbell is connected to your Alexa, which can recognize your voice and all this kind of stuff. But your car, probably the most expensive thing you own, if not the second most, if you own a home.
00:12:34
Speaker
is your vehicle, and that's its level of sophistication. Newer cars, like a lot of Fords, a lot of GMs, whatever, they have the Ford Pass app, my BMW. You can lock and unlock the car, and that's fun. You can maybe remote start it. You can see its fuel level. You could maybe book a maintenance thing.
00:12:56
Speaker
But that's still very single player. That's like that's like the flip phone with, you know, comes preloaded with the LG applications on it. And it's not really a smartphone. Tesla's definitely venturing into the Blackberry era of like sophistication. It's it's still really what a Blackberry was. It was a smartphone or was a flip phone with more bandwidth and a browser.
00:13:21
Speaker
but still just like really first party applications, you're kind of locked into their thing. The iPhone with the app store, there's an app for that. You can download whatever you want. Developers can reach millions and millions of people instantly. It was such a major shift from that. And that's what we're building with demo. It's a long way of getting to that.
00:13:39
Speaker
We're adding the ability for any car from any automaker to connect to this network, establish its digital identity based on blockchain, and then stream data from the car and receive commands back to the car, like lock, unlock, that kind of thing. And the reason it has to be on blockchain is because unlike phones, it's like Google and Apple, right? With automakers, it's
00:14:03
Speaker
a lot, hundreds of different automakers. And the biggest ones, the biggest gorilla in the room is like Toyota with 14% of the cars on the road. Most of them have like 6%, 7%, 2% of the name brands. So you need systems that interoperate. You need kind of a global standard. And by the way too,
00:14:23
Speaker
It's a bunch of different fragmented insurance companies, banks, mechanics are mostly independent use car dealerships are like, you know, Bob's, uh, Hyundai of Western Massachusetts. Like they're all very fragmented. And when you look at what happens when you try to build on Twitter up, they revoke the API. Sorry, tweet bot.
00:14:42
Speaker
try to build games on Facebook. Sorry, Zynga. Revoke in the API. You build things on Apple. Oops, 30% app tax. These automakers have already shown that they're not that interested in trusting corporate entities that GM pulled CarPlay out of its vehicles recently to take more control back of just the infotainment center.
00:15:02
Speaker
So much less like the infrastructure that the cars communicate and kind of interoperate on would be a non-starter. But if you do it on blockchain, then all of a sudden, you can pass the Bahamas test. It can be, hey, you don't have to trust demo. You don't have to trust the founders of demo. Our digital infrastructure, Inc., our kind of labs entity that we work in. You don't have to trust us at all. We can help you. We can provide some services. But if you want to run your own node, if you want to refer to the blockchain as a source of truth,
00:15:30
Speaker
operate this protocol, much like email protocol, RSS, TCP IP for internet, then you can, you don't have to trust us. And now all of a sudden there actually is a value proposition that is palatable.
00:15:43
Speaker
given that you're not having the lock-in and platform risk trade-offs. So what happens when every car is connected to the internet and has connectivity between developers and other cars and sensors and identity and data that is portable from owner to owner is then you get
00:16:04
Speaker
really efficient peer-to-peer car sharing systems, Web3, Uber, where the take rate is like an order of magnitude less than current Uber. You have a smarter insurance and loan, DeFi loans, and secure communications between vehicles and sensors that help it drive itself. And you get out of your car at a parking garage, and it go parks itself, and it pays its own meter. There's so many smart things that we can do with vehicles once they're more digitally connected, and DMO is a platform building that. So you can connect your car now,
00:16:33
Speaker
A lot of this, we're building these building blocks already, and a lot of this works. It's more a matter of adoption and getting people to build on the developer platform. But yeah, it's a demo mobile app, and we have 45,000 cars connected now, and you can add yours today. That's cool. Let me just say that I love the comparison that you made between car manufacturers and mobile phones. I love the idea of comparing them with the flip phone and then Tesla being the BlackBerry, and what really got BlackBerry
00:17:03
Speaker
to basically shoot itself in the foot is the fact that he didn't innovate right it didn't continue to innovate innovated up until a certain point and then when the touchscreen came when iphone announced touchscreen blackberry was like but that's just the fact no one's gonna just use the touchscreen that's impossible so i'm thinking that's exactly the kind of.
00:17:21
Speaker
point that we are right now from your guys perspective the product that you're building in the car industry. I'm like probably a lot of the big manufacturers out there don't consider that a blockchain based
00:17:36
Speaker
IoT solution and decentralized marketplace for car apps is needed right now. But I guess time will tell whether that's going to change their mind.
Tech Behind Demo's Car Connectivity
00:17:46
Speaker
I think it's really cool that you have 45,000 cars already on that. And I also wanted to ask you, if I want to connect my car to demo, how do I go about doing that?
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, we've got, so if you have a newer car in, let's say you have a Tesla, and I do want to say Tesla, I compared them to Blackberry, but so far they've been making all the right moves when it comes to how they're approaching the future. So unlike maybe the way the other legacy tech companies have been, Tesla has formally opened up their APIs and there's a Tesla fleet API and they're kind of letting developers build on top of
00:18:24
Speaker
their API in a much more open way than other tech companies have in the past. The issue still remains. If you're a developer, it's bad enough to build an app for iOS and Android. You want to build an app for each automaker individually, that's a nightmare. That's crazy. And all different standards and whatever. So that's what DMO is.
00:18:48
Speaker
Even with Tesla in a more open position, it really helps Deemo and we're meant to compliment them, not compete with Tesla. But anyway, so if you have a new car like a Tesla or you have a connected Ford, GM, whatever, a lot of newer cars past couple of years, they come with a connected app. You can log in with that email and password and just connect your car that way to Deemo and start seeing data. And the cool thing about that too is
00:19:14
Speaker
If you had the app already, you might have the FordPass app, so you can do a lot of things with your Ford. But if you have a Ford, your wife has a Chevy, your daughter has a Subaru, you can connect all three and manage them all in one application. Better user experience, better UI.
00:19:29
Speaker
So we have that way to connect. And then we also have this, we have, this is our original hardware device. It's a little larger. It just plugs into the OBD port. We have a much smaller one now that runs on the Helium Loremai network. That's a third the price. They're both currently out of stock, sold out.
00:19:45
Speaker
But those connect to any car 2008 and up. So pretty much any vehicle in US, Canada, Europe, including UK and Turkey and Switzerland can connect today.
00:20:01
Speaker
That's cool. Yeah, I was just going to say, because you said something that was really interesting about building applications that then making sure that they're compatible across every car manufacturer. And that's kind of where you come in because you enable this compatibility with demo. So how does it work? Do you guys abstract away from the car manufacturer? Do you build the software that's say bespoke for every
00:20:25
Speaker
car manufacturer firmware or OS or something, and then abstract that away for the user? That's a good question. We built a native integration into Tesla, again, because their API is formally documented and open. We use a company called Smart Car for most other automakers, and this device is produced by a company called Autopi out of Denmark.
00:20:50
Speaker
These are manufactured in Poland and then supposedly has a raspberry pie running in it. More than supposedly. We ripped these apart and confirmed that they have raspberry pies inside of them. Yeah, they're cool. Last year we brought one to East Denver, which we're going to again in a few days. I don't know when this is going to air, but
00:21:07
Speaker
We're about to go to Eat Denver. That dates the when we're recording this. And the last year when we went, we had a Ford Bronco there. We had the autopy plugged in and we were running Mario Kart on the autopy to a TV in the back of the Ford Bronco. So the device was both capturing data for the vehicle and powering
00:21:28
Speaker
uh you know n64 mario kart in the back in the trunk at the same time so yeah it can do quite a bit and it has it has a bunch of ports on it we'll eventually try to do some things with that maybe dash cams antennas uh we actually built a prototype helium laura mapper that could plug into that and just kind of does like
00:21:44
Speaker
You know, mapping validation, right? The other device kind of does that as well because it is a actual helium IOT device and yeah. That's cool. That's cool. So how does the data sharing aspect of it work?
00:22:00
Speaker
from a user perspective and also, you know, like the data that I have access to. I know I had a look on your website. I kind of watched some demos where you have the battery percentage showing or the fuel percentage showing whether you need an oil change or repair or anything like that. So supposedly it just connects to the computer and then feeds you this information on your mobile app, but also shares it or gives you the option to share it with a friend or someone or the network itself. I think that's really interesting, like the sharing aspect of it and how that works.
00:22:29
Speaker
In terms of what we capture, we're trying to get everything. And in terms of what we're able to send back to it, too. Whatever we can do, we will. This device, for a lot of people who connect now, there's still too many cars where they log in and all they get is fuel and odometer, and they can't see tire pressure, they can't see other things. This is capable of getting them. It's just a matter of decoding, which we're trying to make a more open source effort. So maybe if your car is not well supported, you could contribute to decoding the DVC files for your vehicle.
00:23:00
Speaker
Either way, we're going to start making more progress on that soon. And people will see more and more data for their car over time without having to buy new hardware in most cases.
Privacy and Monetization in Demo
00:23:11
Speaker
This can't unlock your car door. You might be able to plug something into it that can. But we're working on adding more decoding functionality so that over time, people will just see more and more. And yeah, it can read.
00:23:25
Speaker
way more than you might think. There's obvious stuff about engine load and RPMs and fuel level and tire pressure, oil life, that kind of stuff, but also ambient air temperature, barometric pressure. There's so many things that it picks up. We're also going to do events like heartbreaking, speeding, and not to tell on you, but it will create the event for you. Whoever you want to share that with, that's up to you, but we'll create events like that. Maybe you want to track your kids or something.
00:23:54
Speaker
Right. So we'll add more of those, try to add more ways to send data back to the vehicle as well, lock it along the car, open and close the trunk. And Frunk, we have that supported for Tesla. Actually can't close the trunk because I don't think I have the power close on those. But you get the point eventually to be self-driving commands.
00:24:15
Speaker
Right. And then what happens with that data? It's probably the next part of it, right? Right now, we're storing all that data securely, and we're very privacy and user-centric in how we approach all this. The idea is that this is like a proton mail, more of a privacy-centric email service. We'll store them for you.
00:24:41
Speaker
We'll store the data for you, but we're only sharing it with people you authorize. So as the owner of the Vehicle ID NFT, you are the admin on the car who can then decide which other accounts
00:24:57
Speaker
get access to the data for that car. And our backend, where we store your data, will not share that data unless the person coming to request it has been given on-chain authorization from you as a permission that's kind of logged on that NFT so you can see all this on-chain you've shared with.
00:25:18
Speaker
And if they have that permission, they can come in and see your car in the app. And other applications can access your vehicle data and stuff. But if you haven't shared it, they can't get it. And right now, we're the only ones, Digital Infrastructure, Inc. We're the only ones that store vehicle data for users. But the idea is that in the future, it's like email, where you could have Google do it. You could have Yahoo do it. You could have Microsoft do it. You could also store it in your own home server. The protocol is the protocol. And as long as how you store that is up to you.
00:25:46
Speaker
So anybody can store it. It's cryptographically verifiable. And all these different storage providers will run a similar piece of software that will make sure that it's only handing off data to verified people that you've decided to share with.
00:26:03
Speaker
That's cool. That's cool. You've said something about allowing people to kind of add more features or ensure, decode the data files of their car if the device doesn't support it. What kind of programming language is your code based on? Starting to get out of my territory a little bit.
00:26:23
Speaker
I have some words I think are the correct ones to say, but I don't even want to risk it and sound like I don't know what I'm talking about. With DBC decoding, there's just a stream of information coming off of the CAN bus that this thing is capturing, and it comes off as a messy string of whatever.
00:26:47
Speaker
And usually, it's some divide by 6, add 3 to get the actual value. This thing is fuel level. Oh, OK. Didn't know that.
00:27:02
Speaker
divided by six, add three gives you the percentage fuel in the car or something like that is like usually then how you would decode it. And it's a lot of just kind of guessing and checking. And so it's much less of like a complex engineering task and much more of a, you know, trying to get in the weeds and do some decoding. So that's more that project. And we still haven't really, we want to open this up so anybody can kind of,
00:27:30
Speaker
submit pull request to some repo that has the different DBC files in it. And then we can test them and roll them out to more people, maybe even put little demo bounties attached to those. We haven't set that up yet though. And it's a little bit complicated. We're working on it.
00:27:46
Speaker
And then how do you scalability test all those things and so on. There's a lot of safety factors to consider. These are safe devices. There's thousands of them out there already, not just ours, but OBD devices are very popular. I've been around for years and years.
00:28:04
Speaker
cars are designed to have them plugged in, it's just we don't want to overwhelm the Canvas and create any type of issue for the user at all or allow it to drain excess battery or whatever. So we're very, very careful about what makes it out onto the devices as an update.
00:28:21
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And I think that totally makes sense. Would you then say that this decoding is needed because not all car manufacturers have an open API or the kind of openness approach that manufacturers like Tesla do? Yeah. There's a bunch of, well, that's different because the CAN bus really wasn't necessarily meant
00:28:41
Speaker
There are a set of standard codes for vehicles, a lot of them, especially after 2008, which is why we have that cutoff. They started to standardize a bit more of the very common signals, but if you wanted to get
00:28:58
Speaker
throttle position on Mercedes, especially with plug-in electric hybrids. These are new control systems, new pieces of equipment, and the OEMs invent their own way of passing those signals. And if you're talking about Mercedes and you're a Mercedes dealership, well, they just give you the tools that work, they know.
00:29:23
Speaker
what it is, but each one, each automaker is a little bit different. So for a third party company, that's not kind of officially integrated. We have to kind of figure it out and that makes it harder.
00:29:33
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's kind of wild when you think that like most car manufacturers don't use a standardized software. It's always a bit bespoke for that car manufacturer. You look at other devices. I mean, you look at laptops, you look at cameras, you look at, you know, phones, like there's a pretty clear, you know, standardization of the data, the workflow, the way they work. And just, yeah, cars just seem to be a little bit not there yet, which I guess it's a really good gap in the market for something like demo to come along and kind of standardize all of that.
00:30:02
Speaker
For all the reasons I mentioned earlier, it's why it can't be. The automaker, they just would not trust some central party with that type of thing, and there was no need to historically. Also, they're hardware manufacturers. They're all really trying so hard to keep up with Tesla on the software, self-driving, electrification side, and it is such a
00:30:28
Speaker
culture shock to try to take a company that had been perfecting a gasoline vehicle and its manufacturing and scale and distribution and hardware side to now say, by the way, you're also a software electronics company now. It's like, OK, good. Yeah. It's like what DNA do they have? What talent do they have? Even a lot of the complex technological parts, like that's outsourced to Bosch and they put Bosch parts inside of a Ford or something like that. So it's a huge pivot.
00:30:56
Speaker
for these car companies to try to, to try to, to try to do this. It explains why we, how we got to where we are, but also without blockchain, we would just stay where we are in this regard for a long time. Um, no, really until it was like required by the government that everybody use one, you know, DMV server for this stuff, but more realistically, it would just never happen without, without a project like DMO and blockchain.
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no, 100%. So going back to the rewards and the data sharing mechanism, right? If you choose to share your data with the network or with manufacturers or with anyone else, then you can be rewarded for it in terms of demo tokens. And is that like a weekly or a monthly distribution? Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways that demo tokens are earned. Right now, the two ways people earn demo tokens is
00:31:50
Speaker
Every week some goes out and that's just kind of like the default baseline issuance. It's like the block reward in Bitcoin and Ethereum. And there was, from the beginning, 450 million demo tokens allocated to that, including the airdrop. So the airdrop was almost like if issuance had been going for a year before it launched. That was kind of a similar number to what was actually
00:32:18
Speaker
put out there and then So right now it's 900 something thousand tokens a week and that's just going down 15% a year as more cars are added to the network There's more people splitting that reward every week, right? But also, you know other dynamics change and people still remain pretty happy with the rewards that's that's the baseline front and it's intended to kind of go down and go away over time because Eventually
00:32:44
Speaker
people will earn more and more of the rewards for doing useful things on the network. And today you can go into our mobile app and go to our marketplace and work, you know, book a book, a maintenance appointment with repair pal. You can offset your carbon footprint, do all kinds of stuff in there. And those things will often have kind of like a demo reward associated with it. Kind of like a credit card, you know, like point that you get. Right. And you, that kind of thing. So people can earn that way as well.
Future Applications of Vehicle Data
00:33:13
Speaker
One thing I should mention, the only time that we share a user's data, there's kind of an implicit opt-in. There's an opt-in when you use the mobile app that we are allowed to share anonymous and aggregated data, truly anonymized. And what we've done so far is we've sold users cell coverage data.
00:33:35
Speaker
to a company called Coverage Critic, they're just looking to see, because our devices have AT&T and T-Mobile in it, they just want to know the signal strain in different areas. And we just give them a generic kind of like blob of it. So really can't tell. I guess they can tell that an ADMO connected vehicle was in that vicinity at some point in recent history. But they really can't tie it back to the user. We monetize that on behalf of users.
00:34:05
Speaker
Again, it's a part of our opt-in when you use our mobile app.
00:34:10
Speaker
But with the money that we get for that, we then share as demo tokens back to the users. So people are already kind of earning above baseline for having these. And it's a small amount now, but it will grow over time. There's demand for weather data, traffic data, battery performance data, and electric vehicles. There's all kinds of things that are kind of truly anonymized that people could make money from the data on. So that's kind of where the tokenomics stand today.
00:34:36
Speaker
In the future, as we're starting to shift towards this developer platform where I can share my data with my insurance company, with a online social community for just Porsche owners, I can share it with a peer-to-peer car sharing app like Tura, whatever.
00:34:53
Speaker
those developers pay for access to the data and some of that reward comes back to me, some of that goes to the data storage provider and some of that is burned. It's kind of the model that we're starting to flesh out more and will hope to put together some type of proposal on sometime this year.
00:35:12
Speaker
So that's more long-term, uh, tokenomic dynamics is, you know, it's like when you're sharing your vehicle, when you're minting and unpairing, pairing and unpairing cars and burning cars, whatever. When you're doing things on the network, when you're sharing your data, when someone's subscribed to data each month, you know, there's going to be some tokens going to users, tokens going to data source providers, and some tokens being burned.
00:35:35
Speaker
That's cool. And what do you think are the current use cases for this anonymized data? What are some of the biggest, I guess, aggregators of this data and what do they build with it? Yeah, I think so. There definitely is a great use case for just like buying the data for the data's sake. And I don't want to discount it, but the bigger thing is definitely applications like
00:36:01
Speaker
The value on iPhones isn't buying GPS data from users, although there's value in that. If you subscribe to everybody's iPhone's GPS, you might know where people are gathering and traffic data. There's, I guess, monetary value. But the real value with an iPhone is the fact that you can access Spotify and Audible
00:36:21
Speaker
and Uber and whatever else, and have that direct relationship to someone providing you a real utility. So to answer your question on data aggregation, first, sure,
00:36:33
Speaker
buying cell coverage data, traffic data, EV performance data, autonomous vehicle driving data, being the source of truth. What happens when an autonomous vehicle gets in an accident with another one? And it's like they have an autonomous driving system from one company, parts from another company, manufactured by a different company, maybe with an operator from another company sitting in the front seat, like who's at fault? What happened here? What's the equivalent of the black box inside of an airplane? So there's lots of uses for just
00:37:02
Speaker
hiring vehicle data. McKinsey had a cool report on this. They said they think it's $600 a year per car, which is a lot. Maybe it's not a lot compared to the cost of a car, but in terms of what you could monetize for a user every year, 600 bucks is not immaterial per car, and there's billions of cars out there.
00:37:21
Speaker
Uh, that's, that's the kind of pure data monetization side, but really where we've leaned in more. And, and I think there's a bigger opportunity in, isn't all of the new use cases that, Oh, well, if I can subscribe to your data, now I can offer you a much better insurance policy. Even if I'm not like watching, seeing if you're speeding and whatnot, if I just know how often you're driving, um, if, you know, you could build, you could build better versions of Uber, you could build better versions of Turo, you could build, um,
00:37:50
Speaker
better ways you could use Tappen to DeFi for financing your vehicle. I actually plan to give this talk next week in Denver where I have this entire used car marketplace built and it's kind of like OpenSea or Blur because it's an aggregator of all these on-chain listings of vehicles. The vehicles are all NFTs and their verified data is shared with an analytics company, which then gives the vehicle a really comprehensive health score.
00:38:17
Speaker
It's like looking, it's like, knows exactly where the car's been driven up. It was like, was it driven on salty roads up in the Northeast over potholes or was it driven in the South or in the Northeast or was it driven in the Southeast and it's sunshine and clear, like the mileage is different. How was your EV charge? Were you always overcharging, supercharging it and hurting the battery? What's the health of it? So pulling all that data together, like a real good health score for the vehicle
00:38:46
Speaker
Then I go in that demo, I go to buy the car. I'm able to trade in my vehicle on chain because my car is also an NFT on chain and my loan's on chain, so it knows how much I still owe. It's like click, click, click. Everything just swaps. You go to a place to exchange, you swap keys. A couple of people sign a transaction.
00:39:06
Speaker
And boom, everything just goes on chain. And the value, not just there's some definitely user experience value, but as somebody who used to work at Vroom.com and used car e-commerce, the behind the scenes mess of just fax machines, paperwork, calling, DMVs, all of that is just insane. And the customer ends up paying for it in one way or another because these businesses need to make money.
00:39:35
Speaker
So much value can be added by modernizing our infrastructure on vehicle commerce and communications and use cases. So that's really where I think more value is going to be unlocked. Right. Well, even the fact that it's all recorded on an immutable ledger and you can actually trust this because it is a trustless system. You can trust that. Well, like you said, it's been driven in a in a certain way and it was charged in a certain way. And you have a confirmation that all of it just gives you more trust on a secondary market.
Demo as a Standard for Vehicle Connectivity
00:40:03
Speaker
Do you remember the times when people used to artificially roll back the mileage on cars and just sell them on the secondary market? I can't really do that anymore nowadays, but you could do it like up to, I think, 10, 15 years ago. You could technically do that on an old car. You could just take it to the black market and just, you know.
00:40:22
Speaker
People still sell a lot of their cars on Craigslist. It's a shockingly, it's whatever percent of cars you think are sold private party, the number is probably higher. Like most people sell their cars. And in that case, it's like you show up with an envelope full of cash. You're kind of just like, maybe you bring your brother-in-law. He's got, you know, just like, please, you know, if this goes badly, help me. You know, and you're just hoping the car that you buy isn't going to just fall apart within three blocks after you get it.
00:40:48
Speaker
And that's still often a better way to sell your car than trading it into a dealer. Usually the price you get is better selling it that way than you trade to give it to a dealer, then they mark it up and sell it for more. So it goes to show you how much room there is for improvement in these transactions. And also, again, being of room and being on the inventory side for a little bit, I could tell you.
00:41:10
Speaker
The lack of information and information asymmetry in these transactions means that we have to lowball people on their trade in offers because one in every 10 cars, we're going to lose 10 grand on because there's some major issue with it that we couldn't find in a visual inspection. People think it's all like, I need to look at the car to appraise its value.
00:41:30
Speaker
Paintless dent repair, tires, that stuff is cheap for dealers to deal with, more or less. Engine issues, electric vehicle battery problems, that's the really big thing. If they're going to try to fix it or worse, they just don't hand it off to the person that they sell it to and hope for the best.
00:41:50
Speaker
If they can get that type of data, a lot of these more tech-forward companies have just been giving instant offers based on odometer and trim alone recently. That's enough information for them to go off of. We can improve a lot of aspects of commerce, not just the speed of it, but people spend 12 grand a year on their cars. That's too much. We can get a lot of that back. Even making a small percentage improvement in that is a lot of money, and we can make a big percentage improvement in that.
00:42:20
Speaker
Yeah. Do you think car manufacturers use that data when you go into like a buyback program with them? Like if you sell your car back to BMW? I mean, I don't know. I don't work there, but I can, I would bet almost anything that they do not.
00:42:34
Speaker
They might use a couple different markers. I'm sure they're using odometer, but I really doubt that they're looking at where the car was driven, how it was driven, hard braking events, acceleration, engine load, how much you're redlining it. Probably not looking at it. I would be shocked if they were collecting that and looking at it.
00:42:56
Speaker
Whenever we talk to automakers, they actually don't look at DMOs competitive. They're like, oh, thank God, somebody's doing something because it's just been so bad for so long. And we've tried, and our company is not built for this. There's a reason that Samsung and LG and others like using Android rather than building their own OS from scratch. They just want to focus on making great hardware. Right. Yeah.
00:43:21
Speaker
No, and I think that makes sense, honestly. Um, okay. So you're obviously demo is really good for B to C, but are there any B to B use cases that you're seeing right now or that you'd like to encourage going forward? Things like Uber or similar applications that could more efficiently manage their fleet. Yeah. I think of, I think of demo a lot like Ethereum, uh, and demo mobile being kind of like MetaMask in that scenario, rainbow or whatever your pick your favorite wallet.
00:43:52
Speaker
you know, MetaMask, for example, it's awesome. You can see your NFTs, you can send, you can receive, you can swap in there. So it does some of the basic stuff, but the biggest thing that it does is it connects you to all the other cool things built by other businesses on the network. And that's kind of really our intention as well.
00:44:11
Speaker
And right now, we're like Ethereum with just MetaMask and a couple small applications. But in the future, the main reason that you get connected to demo will not be to access the demo mobile app. We want that to continue to be a great app and to be something everybody does want. But the same reason you don't buy an iPhone purely for the calculator or purely for the phone or the calendar. Right.
00:44:37
Speaker
You'll download demo because, well, yeah, I want demo mobile to check in on fuel levels and set alerts for my cars and this and that. But my mechanic uses his systems run on top of demo. And when he makes entries in his system about the repairs he just did and sets reminders for me and this and that, that's all being attached to my demo glove box.
00:45:03
Speaker
And the data is passing with me. Now my records are immutably tied to the vehicle forever. And that passes me from owner to owner and that kind of stuff. Oh, and my car came pre-installed with it because my dealership used it to find the cars on the lot and for their dealer management systems. So we intend for this to kind of be a ubiquitous infrastructure layer.
00:45:25
Speaker
for every business, every consumer. It'll be in the same way you couldn't imagine a computer without a browser or a person without an email address or a phone, like a car without demo will not really fit into the modern world in
Challenges with Automaker Integration
00:45:40
Speaker
10 years. So yeah, businesses will use it, individuals use it to access different applications on top of it and it will just kind of fade into the background.
00:45:47
Speaker
as a piece of tech that comes standard with cars. That's cool, man. And do you think, um, I'm sorry, do you currently have any, uh, partnerships with car companies that do any con companies are installing demo on their, uh, on their cars or are they planning to in the future? We're not quite there yet.
00:46:09
Speaker
Automakers, they like what we're doing, particularly because they have these connected vehicle subscriptions like FordPass, and people tend not to renew them after the free trial ends, and our users do renew them and can keep them going, so they love that, and they also like what we're-
00:46:23
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So they like that we do that for them. They like that there's somebody else out there trying to keep them competitive on the software side and providing a great user experience, connected vehicle experience. Because a lot of people aren't necessarily buying Teslas just because a Tesla mobile app is great, but it's kind of all of that. It's like the Tesla mobile app's really good, the supercharger network, cool looking car. So they're trying to stay competitive. They like us for that. We're talking to different automakers. We have
00:46:52
Speaker
varying degrees of channels and whether it's just like an API agreement with them, like that kind of stuff. We have some of that stuff, but in terms of a more formal partnership, whether cars are rolling off the assembly line connected to demo, not quite there yet, but definitely, definitely on, you know, I, I expect to see that and not, not too distant future.
00:47:15
Speaker
I mean, I've done a bit of research on demo beforehand ahead of time. I read a little bit on the website. I noticed what some people are saying. But getting it from you, it just seems like the kind of solution that it should just, you know, companies, like car companies, automakers should just have cars roll out with that software pre-installed.
00:47:37
Speaker
It seems like a cool solution. I would totally install that. I think it's totally cool to have that on. Do you have any new releases coming up apart from demo for cars, essentially? Because I think the idea from what I gather from the website is that you're envisioning an IoT, a blockchain-based IoT for more than just cars, even though you're only focusing on cars right now.
00:48:06
Speaker
Right. We're definitely going to keep ourselves focused on cars. If people want to adopt, a lot of what we're building is reusable, right? We call it the vehicle ID NFT. It's a great way to establish identity for an item that has a manufacturer, a model, and like a version number attached to it, and permissioning for accessing its data. There's no reason that technology couldn't be applied to any other IoT device.
00:48:35
Speaker
Right. The issue is that actually the Web3 protocol aspect of it, you probably look at a company like demo and think must be a bunch of smart contract engineers over there. It's all blockchain. The blockchain bit is kind of at the bedrock and it's really fundamental and it's pretty simple and basic and it's incredibly important.
00:49:01
Speaker
That is not the majority of the work. The same is like the majority of the development in the Ethereum ecosystem is not at the core protocol layer. It's at like the, and you have to have clients and node operators and Infura and Alchemy, like RPC endpoint providers. You need to build open, see like most of the work is further up the stack. And so if we try to,
00:49:27
Speaker
make this work for all kinds of other devices. Well, all right, now we need to have
00:49:36
Speaker
Our backend needs to know when it's receiving data, we need to expose different types of endpoints and cater to different types of developers and our go-to-market, our messaging, all of that will be a lot more diffused. So as a strategy, Amazon started with books, right? Right. We're starting with cars that way and the same way that Amazon dominated books before it really moved on, where it will dominate vehicles. And I think one cool thing about building this as a protocol, that's more open,
00:50:03
Speaker
Our Digital Infrastructure Inc. business might stay focused on cars forever, but the demo protocol can expand permissionlessly, horizontally, in whatever ways it wants to, in the same way that nobody can constrain how Ethereum is developed and applied.
Future Growth and Beyond Cars
00:50:20
Speaker
Even Bitcoin. It's not Satoshi over there that's decided that we're going to do Bitcoin NFTs now.
00:50:28
Speaker
jammed NFTs into Bitcoin recently to make that a thing. And it was never part of the core roadmap that somebody set. So same thing happened with demo eventually. That ultimately necessary. It's much more scalable to allow things to kind of happen organically that way. But yeah, we need to make sure that the car use case is solid before we try to move on to toaster ovens and Roombas and stuff like that.
00:50:57
Speaker
That makes sense. Well, I wasn't thinking toaster ovens, but I was actually I was just I was just thinking right now that you could apply technically the same kind of approach to to homes, to buildings, apartment apartment buildings and stuff like that. You could have sensors and you could, you know, measure the state of the apartment or maintain or, you know, record that information anonymously for for whatever reasons without hopefully turning it all into into a dystopic universe where everything is super controlled.
00:51:25
Speaker
I think privacy is still really important and I think Web3 has been so far quite good at maintaining privacy and hopefully will continue to do so. We'll see. I mean, there's the discussion about CBDCs that kind of cooled down in the last few months that was really active a few months ago.
00:51:45
Speaker
It's tough to navigate, I guess, new emerging technology that has the possibility to create a system of a transparent system of control without letting someone take advantage of that information, I guess.
00:52:00
Speaker
Look, it's going to happen in terms of technological advancement. The question is the one you asked, which is, or the thing that you were kind of getting into, which is, is it going to be privacy preserving and utopian or is it going to be controlling and dystopian? There's nothing magical about it per se. PCs and smartphones are basically the same thing. One small one's big.
00:52:25
Speaker
But with PCs, you can take them apart, add RAM to it, install whatever applications you want to do, whatever you want with them. You know, install your own OS on it. You take an iPhone and you're totally locked in. And it's really just like one paradigm, you know, kind of emerging one out.
00:52:43
Speaker
And I think it's great timing that blockchain is kind of coming onto the scene now. We'll see more of these open models coming back because we can. We used to feel like we had to make this trade off. And for all the other reasons I mentioned too, where it's not even up to the consumer to trade off on their privacy, the automakers will not adopt the Amazon or Apple or Google version of what we're building because they're not going to trust that the terms won't change on them once they've fully adopted it and all of that.
00:53:13
Speaker
So it'll end up having to be a more open solution regardless. And the way that we're building this is really meant to be users fully in control. I think we can actually really show the industry, the world, how you can build a system like this that has all the benefits of data and programmability and all that kind of stuff without needing to make that compromise. Not only that, but users are actually, not only like is the
00:53:40
Speaker
Are you not, you have more control. The monetization and benefit is flowing more to you as the user. And the technology is more kind of open and configurable. It's like kind of the best of all worlds, hybrid cake. You need it too. I know it sounds like a little too good to be true. It's why people get so excited about blockchains in the first place is because they know that it kind of can do these things. And that's kind of how we're trying to build demo.
00:54:05
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it sounds incredibly exciting. Um, I think it's a great product that has a lot of potential and I wish you guys all the best with it. I'll be keeping a, keeping a close eye. If you have like a discord or Twitter or anything, um, I will probably end up lurking there just to kind of.
00:54:22
Speaker
tag along with the progress and maybe I'll start some of the repos to see how the code base is going to develop. Do you have anything that you want to share with the listeners at this stage, any socials, how to get the app or anything like that? I was just going to say that it's drivedemo.com for the app and the store. That's the website for Digital Infrastructure, Inc., our US Labs entity.
00:54:43
Speaker
So head there to learn about the project, get connected, all that. demo.zone is the website for the foundation and chat.demo.zone is the Discord. On Twitter, the main Twitter account is at demo underscore network.
00:55:00
Speaker
And so everybody should follow that. I should download the app, Connect Your Card today. As I mentioned, a lot of people can connect for free pretty quickly. And it's really like you see more data, you earn, there's no cost. And if a cost ever is introduced as a monthly subscription cost to stay connected, it'll be less than the rewards. It'll come out of the rewards. But for now, there's no cost to connect. And yeah, join the movement.
00:55:30
Speaker
I'm at Rob M. Solomon on Twitter as well if you want to follow me. I'm really close to 1,000 followers. I'm trying to get 995 right now. Yeah, let's crack that. I don't know if I follow you, but I'll definitely will. I'll definitely keep in touch. You could be the 1,000th follower. Oh, man. Listen, it's been a great conversation. I think I've learned a lot about demo and about the ecosystem, and it's been genuinely a pleasure.
00:55:57
Speaker
I'm happy to have you on. You're welcome here. Any other point in the future, if you want to give like a year update, maybe a year in to see kind of where we are, where the car manufacturing industry is, where the software side of things is, that'd be fascinating. Appreciate that. Thank you. Nice one, Rob. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Bye.