Connecting your car to the future onchain with DIMO

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jbird and I believe that vehicles on chain are going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 welcome back everybody to another episode today we have Andy chadam the CEO and co-founder of demo joining us now what is demo demo is a connected vehicle platform that is built on chain now what's interesting about this conversation is deo didn't start as a crypto company blockchain was

actually added down the road after they realized that crypto was a great way to incentivize users to install devices in their cars which is a core part of what demo is building Now demo aims to build a platform upon which a number of applications can be built to make your experience of driving your car better so anybody can download the demo app right now and if you have a car that was built in the last five years you can connect to that car because that car very likely has a smart device within it currently and if you connect the demo app to your smart device within your car you can see on the app you can see how much gas you

have in the tank you can see how much range you have left what your tire pressure is your battery voltage can even see a live value of your car and connect directly to a marketplace where you could sell your car if you want in the future they also have the plans to connect to insurance providers where an insurance provider could make you an offer based upon the data that your insurance that insurance provider could access now we've talked a lot about this at web three Academy is that we believe that the next wave of onchain adoption isn't financial apps it's not art onchain it's consumer apps it's consumer

apps that provide you with a better user experience by using blockchain in the back end Andy even says in this episode that the way the tech works is that the car is actually an nft that's created on chain now they don't promote that though you go to the demo app the demo website it's not saying turn your NF turn your car into an nft they are abstracting away all of the crypto all of the blockchain stuff and just providing me with a better experience of your car so that you can have a simpler experience less less trouble when let's say you're going to a mechanic you now can have

more data because you understand more about your car as opposed to that data being owned by your car manufacturer or only being accessible by your mechanic there's no reason why we can't put power power back in the hands of users and that is exactly what demo is aiming to do this is just an incredible episode at what is going what the future of blockchain is going to be it's so much bigger than the way we currently realize it and a lot of it has to do with data and enabling us the users to own that data as opposed to just the companies using and owning that data and then selling it out the back door and a lot

of it has to do with trust and how much we lack trust currently in our digital landscape and as we have more data on chain we need to build more connected platforms connected ecosystems where that data can be shared but it can only be shared if you give it permission because you have custody of that data just incredibly exciting to see what demo is building you guys are really going to enjoy this episode before we do we'll just take a minute to hear from our sponsor paragraph modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web 3 to supercharge

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this is the future of newsletters because of the profound engagement it creates between creators and fans so whether you're a Creator writer or an Avid Reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on the opportunity of being early GM Andy welcome to web3 Academy thanks for having me let's just start I feel like it's the explaining demo is not simple it's not the most obvious business to get because you're disrupting the entire car industry in a way so in your own words what is demo and what are you building yeah to the the web 3 initiated you can think of demo as a protocol for

connected Vehicles it's actually a general purpose iot protocol so what it does is create onchain identities for iot devices and the biggest category of iot device today is a car and then then it has the ability to verify data coming from those vehicles and issue rewards and other incentives and digital assets to unchain devices based on their behavior in the real world and so effectively what that means today is there's apps built on demo that allow you to connect and verify ownership of a car and then to earn tokens and get issued other you know onchain assets for doing real world activities with those vehicles and we're also building on top

of demo on top of the protocol just like on top of ethereum there's you know metamask and openc we're building apps and Integrations and services that allow for more efficient markets to be created on top of those onchain assets so we're building plugins to the insurance Market into the used car market making it easier for people to get repair services and you know quotes for tires all these things can be made more efficient with better access to data and having you know one canonical copy of of the data from a vehicle allows us to you know kind of build a much more robust ecosystem of of applications on top of cars and other connected devices and so we've been building it for about two

years and yeah what what you see today is is really kind of like the first version that's been out there for in production in mainnet for less than a year at this point I want to get into how you're using blockchain but before we do I just want to take a step back you have an interesting set of co-founders and I think that it's helpful to maybe give a little bit of a brief background on the founders and how that led you down the path of starting demo and really like what was the initial problems you were trying to solve yeah so I I've spent about 10 years in the mobility space I got started back in 2012 when people were

sort of initially starting to get very excited about connected electric vehicle technology and starting to think about autonomous vehicles and spent about you know a decade after that working on different projects that were trying to bring those Technologies into the real world and most recently before starting demo I was working at a company called transdev which is a large Bus and Rail systems operator primarily and and I worked to build a business there that was focused on helping autonomous vehicle companies scale up from being science projects to like actual useful pieces of Transportation infrastructure and spent a lot of time working with some of the market leaders like whmo and you know some companies building

autonomous shuttles and learned a lot about the limitations with the that technology and and also like one of the big issues that people are starting to see today which is it's really hard to get people to trust them and there's an incredible amount of value that's placed in the data that's coming from those Vehicles especially when there's incidents or know certain types of issues that that come up as they're operating in the real world and there were no real solutions proposed to the problem of how do you distribute trust from like one company whether it's you know Google operating a fleet of self-driving cars to multiple companies like an insurance company or Fleet operator like transdev or local government so that kind of got me initially thinking down the line of you know could there be some sort of blockchain based solution or distributed

you know Network that that could be created to help the users at the edge of the network actually have more control over the data when it's produced by these cars and have more confidence in their decisions as a result of that and I connected with kind of like the CTO of the project one of the co-founders who was um thinking about a lot of the same issues and and was building dispatch systems for Ford and Argo ai's autonomous vehicle Fleet in that was rolling out in Miami about 2019 and we iterated on a bunch of different ideas and and one of the things we started doing was building helium networks and that got us down the rabbit hole of creating real world application that used a blockchain to increase trust and and certainty amongst a distributed

network of people that were all you know creating some some useful real world asset and we had a lot of the domain expertise and and Technical knowledge to create something very similar for the automotive world and yeah a lot of the pieces to create demo didn't really exist back in 2019 but even by 2020 2021 with you know examples like helium out there other pieces of infrastructure allowing us to connect cars without having to put a piece of heart ware in them and then also the ability to create Hardware that you could plug into a car very easily that was kind of like all of the ingredients that you needed in order to make demo exist in a in a technical sense and then two of the other co-founders who I knew from from previous jobs I was able to Loop in and they were both working in the crypto

space one of them Rob was at consensus which was responsible for metamask and infura and a lot of the ethereum infrastructure and the other is Alex who's working at a company called TR analysis and really had a lot of experience in terms of helping very web 2 companies start to think about web 3 data and networks and so that's you know a very important part of what we're doing at demo as we've built a supply of connected Vehicles now that's over 25 26,000 cars like marketing that to companies that are trying to use it for some real world purpose and to plug in their existing Services is becoming very important and so those were the four four folks who started you know kind of jumping in at the beginning and then we were able to go recruit a bunch of really talented Engineers folks who were

building really large scale distributed systems for telom and and in the automotive space and that's formed the the sort of nucleus and we've also been very lucky to recruit lots of really great Partners folks who are building Hardware devices and applications on the network and yeah all that has kind of happened in the last two years so it's one of those rare like time and place sort of scenarios where it wasn't necessarily a new idea that we had to create an open decentralized network for iot devices but a lot of the pieces and and kind of like the bootstrapping that canist just had had really become possible you mentioned so many things in there so many threads that I want to pull on and for those listening on the podcast Andy has flashed a few times a

hardware device on screen and we'll talk about that Hardware device and how that fits into this ecosystem and what you're building before we do though many of us own a car I have a car I've got a Ford F-150 truck but I don't know that most of us really understand that there is a hardware device in our car what is the data that that's capturing how is that used currently can you just kind of give us a background on like what's the current state of connected vehicle Market is it just car manufacturers right now building things like Ford pass and how does it currently work how do they share data yeah so there's basically three different kinds of cars on the road today there's a car with no connectivity and that car will still

have a bunch of computers on it that are producing data for things like the radio the infotainment system that's showing you you know how fast your car is going and maybe some of the they're called ecus that that control the automatic braking system or something else but but not connected at all so no outside internet connection and then in the last five or six years the majority of the cars that are coming off of the production line have something like OnStar or in your case Ford pass that is you know basically like a cell phone that's embedded in the car that's collecting some data from the car and sending it back to the cloud and you have to have a subscription for it and it's pulling everything from like your tire pressure to your oil levels your fuel level it can also have emergency services

associated with it and it's basically embedded in the vehicle but the car itself is still in that case like a bunch of different other computers that are you know you know maybe sharing data back to this central place where it's then you know aggregated and sent back up to some you know GM controlled or Ford controlled server and then recently there's What's called the software defined vehicle which is what a Tesla is and and a lot of new newer newer cars are starting to be you know most of the older OEM like Ford and GM are migrating to this new platform where there's one Central Computer on the vehicle that Aggregates and basically brings all the intelligence from the edge of the network that's in the car to the center and and allows it to do a lot more computation on the data and has more

sensors so maybe it's you know bringing in video camera data from outside the vehicle if you look at most cars today there's there's typically two cameras like right above the dash that are always you on outwards and the software defined vehicle is typically associated with an electric car and a car that also has automated driving capabilities but those are not necessarily part of it and those cars are able to the interesting thing about those vehicles that they're basically like a cell phone they're able to get over the air updates they can you essentially produce like a firmware update for the vehicle where if you have an issue with a tire pressure monitoring system you can create an overthe update that fixes it without having to bring the car into the dealer and that also introduces new capabilities but also new cyber security risks with the vehicles

because you know in the past it was very security through technical complexity and and obsolescence and and now today like you know there is essentially a button of Tesla that can you can hit and it updates a million cars that are driving on public roads today and and that's a little terrifying but the reality of the world that we live in and and so we look at that and and say well we're building solutions for all those things so we have a hardware device that you can plug into you know the first car the dumb car and give it an internet connection and then you have the ability to see it on a map you can pull some data from it all these cars have standard it's called the canbas so it's a you know standard way of transmitting data that says here's an error code that

just popped so we can read that with a hardware device and then say okay well you know instead of having to drive to AutoZone and plug their error code reader in it you basically have that you know capability yourself and then we've also created the ability for people with existing connected vehicles to start collecting their own data from those cars and storing it on their own so we've built one app that allows you to connect any type of car whether it's a Tesla or a GM car that has OnStar or your car with Ford pass or a car that you're showing up and plugging a hardware device into and you get the standardized kind of same readout on the data from them you can see them all on the same map and then importantly we're also building an ecosystem of services that can use the data from those cars

and you know take the VIN number and the odometer and you know the fuel level and give you back an idea of like here's the cheapest place to go get gas or this company says they can save you 20% on insurance and and the idea there is to sort of invert the balance of power from the car company or the car dealer has all the data about your car today and you're asking them to see it or to use it and instead you have all the data and they're asking you like can I see it and and use it and that's you know a very important Dynamic shift that we've started to put in in place and one of the difficult things that we had to do is make it work for every car which we've put a ton of effort into and then now the next you know difficult

challenges is taking all of that data that we've helped users collect about their own car and then making it available to third party developers in a way where the user is in charge of who gets access to it um and this is something that you know today is for most people interesting but not like the most useful pressing thing in the world but as cars are increasingly automated and the the computer on the car is making more decisions and cars get more expensive and and Tech enabled like it's going to become more and more important and so we wanted to provide an alternative to what we saw happening which was power getting centralized in companies like Tesla and GM and Ford as they're connecting their C to the internet because in the past they'd sell you the car and you owned it and that

was it they'd say you have to take it to dealership to get fixed or whatever but now we saw like okay well they're actually like involved in everything going on with the car after they sell it to you and they also can make pretty questionable decisions about what to do with the data so we felt like it was important to give people the ability to opt out of that kind of like you know surveillance regime without losing the the connected core functionality and and that's what we've delivered up to this point yeah and I think that one thing that really amazed me from downloading the demo app and having the Ford Pass App is the demo app is just better it's just a bank we've invested a lot of time and effort into that and yeah I mean yeah Ford's a massive company like they

put a ton of time and effort into Ford pass as well right have thousands of people working on it yeah like exact thousands of people why are they not capable of producing a great app they are I mean Hardware is really hard and they're in the hardest Hardware category like they're primarily a hardware and manufacturing company and the mentality around creating a software product and I think consumer expectations like one of the beautiful things about consumer expectations is that they keep getting higher every year and a car is something that you make and Ford made your car I don't know what like three four years years ago and that you know maybe the forward Pass App that you're using would

have felt amazing three years ago and now even three years later it's like well it sucks like you know Tesla's app is way better than this but like TLA has a software defined vehicle that they continuously update over the air and like your Ford vehicle has not gotten one OTA update since you bought it probably and may maybe it has but probably not and so it's really hard to build a compelling consumer iot product in the automotive space and I think really only Tesla has delivered on that rivian's pretty pretty good too like they're you know both kind of like starting with a clean slate and even then it's it's incredibly hard and they're having to build for a tremendously wide breadth of vehicles so

like they have you know Ford has a pretty small vehicle lineup actually I think you know especially compared to like GM or volswagen which includes Audi and Porsche and all this you know but there's a ton of limitations that they're faced with and also like the architecture that they've chosen and like the way their supply chain works is is very difficult there's a Tik Tok I can I can send you or like you know video that the Ford CEO was giving an interview and he basically said he explained the reason for this which is in order to save three four $500 per vehicle they shopped out the like connected vehicle portion of their supply chain to a third party provider some tier one supplier like Bosch or Continental or whoever and they're now in a situation where like they don't control that piece of the stack in their

car and so if they want to update it or if they want to like integrate a new feature into their app they have to involve a third party and there's a change order and like you know they haven't set up their and in newer Vehicles that's not going to be the case but they're still supporting your car and probably five or six other flavors of connected vehicle system that they have out there in the real world and so it's tremendously comp complicated you I have a ton of respect for the automakers like generally we try to be you know very like uh humble when it comes to the difficulties associated with building Hardware because even you know creating a $100 plug-in Hardware device like is is tough and they're doing something that is probably two orders of magnitude more complicated and trying to deliver a

consumer software product on top of that which is very hard yeah and I think the other issue that we've seen is once and I'm sure you have insight into this once it's like once all the car manufacturers realized that okay we have connected Vehicles we can start to collect all this data well I'm sure Vue Bells went off in their head and they were like okay well let's monetize all this data which we all know creates misaligned incentives because they're going to monetize it their way with their insurance partner or whatever partner versus a open market where the end user gets to have control and can basically

enable as you said enable whoever they want to have access to that data because they have custody of it that's kind of the chapter that is closing right now now in that whole world and there were a bunch of Consultants that showed up in Detroit and Germany you know over the last 5 seven years and said hey you've got all this data it's so great like you can sell it and you can you know create they actually went and created a bunch of other like third party data broker companies that just finished going bankrupt or getting acquired for nothing over the last six months and there were the vision was like we have 10 million cars on the road with internet connections and we can sell that data to whoever and they'll be able to use it and like we actually went through the process of trying to buy that data at

the beginning of starting Deo because we thought of it as like maybe this is a way that we could like give it back to the owners of those cars and have them kind of like bootstrap the network that way and we realized that they they wouldn't sell it to us for that use and then that was you know a situation where we're like okay well there's if somebody can say no like if you have to ask somebody in a boardroom in Detroit in order to build an app on a car then you're never going to create a developer platform because developers don't want to talk to people in Detroit in order to build something and like somebody's always going to come up with a reason to say no yeah and so that's what led us to go straight to the source and to build the hardware

product and to build the software that allows a person to directly log into their car and that creates an environment where like you might not have all of the data but you have enough like most of the app developers that we're working with for example just care about like odometer Vin and then like one other data point whether it's like tire pressure and like sometimes not even sometimes it's just odometer a bit and like that's good enough you can get that for a large number of cars and can also create a situation where they're interacting directly with the user versus having to go through another company and that creates a situation where like you're going to see 10 times as much stuff get built in that kind of environment versus one where you have to ask for permission and the OEM is trying to like extract some rent out of you

know Progressive or AutoZone or whoever is is trying to build in their ecosystem and I think that the history of how you know Tech platforms have been built is pretty pretty aligned with that and they're starting to realize it and you see you know GM made an announcement about opening up their developer platform Tesla made an announcement about opening up their developer platform and like they recognize that if people want to build apps that use the data from their car it makes their car better and they don't really have a leg to stand on if they're trying to prevent the owners of their vehicles from accessing the data from their cars and the market is set up in such a way where it's not like IOS and Android where there's only two games in town There's 12 different you know scaled automakers they're making you know millions of cars

a year and and so that creates an environment where like they all kind of have to be open in order to be competitive and that's going to play out over fiveyear product cycle in the automotive spacee it's not like cell phones where it turns over every two years it's so interesting to compare compare it to social media in a way and the way you know Twitter used to be open and had an open API and was letting developers build on it and then all the other social media companies went closed ecosystem wal Garden we Control Data our Revenue model is we sell that data out the back door and Twitter followed suit and we now have all these closed ecosystems nobody can build on top of

them and now web 3 is coming in blockchain allows and we're seeing you know forecaster and lens and doo yeah other web three social platforms take off because there's these open ecosystems that anyone can build and so in the same way it's sort of the same thing as you guys are targeting that Vision with cars right is there's all this data that's put into the hands of the users let's equip them with it and then let's allow developers to build on top yep and plug it in in our case like there's willing buyers and the buyers are not necessarily interested in like where you went on Tuesday they're interested in selling you insurance and like if you can share a little bit of data with them and they trust that data because it's verified and you know and

they have some degree of trust in its ability you know in how it's been collected then they're willing to pay in some cases thousands of dollars to acquire you as a customer and they can offer you some sort of discount versus the competition if they're actually factoring that data into their underwriting process whether it's for a loan or an insurance premium or they're selling you insurance or sorry they're selling you maintenance or tires and so you know with cars like the the other thing is that people kind of forget about this but it's it's the second biggest item in most people's budget the market is five times bigger than phone handsets so if you look at like Apple's Revenue I mean apple is wildly profitable their margins are huge but like their fraction of the revenue of the automotive industry and there's a ton of other like most cars spend about

three times their initial purchase price just staying on the road throughout the course of their life cycle and so you know Fuel and maintenance and insurance and and all of those markets you know should can and should be much more data driven and the thing that's preventing that from happening is that there are no developer platforms for cars and it's tremendously difficult to like aggregate enough Supply in order to make it worth building on on one network and that's what we're doing so users clearly like this like I love it gives me a better app maybe I get a better rate on my insurance maybe I don't have to go to my car mechanic to get him to scan some code and he charges me $100 when I just scanned it myself right yeah like so I

like it I'm convinced do car manufacturers like this do they support this can they shut this down somehow like we kind of touched this on on this before like we have a tremendous amount of respect for the automotive industry and how difficult it is to build a reliable car keep it on the road and we try not to be antagonistic towards the oems or do things that are like you know against their policies but we also draw a pretty hard line in terms of like if this is a card that you're paying for you leas it you bought it like the data from that car belongs to you and we're going to do everything we can to give you access to it and help you make better decisions with that data and so we've certainly seen behavior on the part of OEM especially with newer cars

where they're trying to limit access to that data and keep you in their wal garden and they'll send emails to users and say hey like we noticed you have a third party app connected like this is you know potentially unsafe or like try to like basically scare a boy them into just using their app which is sort of silly and like plaid kind of fought this war with the banks and won where they got to the point where it's like if you're a bank and you're offering an app or a website that gives somebody access to their banking information and they want to log in and like pull that data into some third- party service like you got to give them the data and cars are basically going through the same struggle right now there has been a very longstanding debate about the OBD Port

the universal Port that's on every car and access to information from the vehicle and it goes all the way back to the there's a right to repairs is the kind of buzz word for that and Zan in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance like do you want the like blackbox BMW it's beautiful machine but you can't fix it or do you want the like you know fully open- Source you know swap holding Parts in and out person and we're kind of in the like digital version of that debate right now where there's some vehicles that you just literally can't fix without you know very expensive piece of OEM diagnostic equipment and like you know that is very relevant for gas cars for electric vehicles they actually need less maintenance on like the core powertrain but there's a lot of valuable data that comes from the battery and the

battery is 60% of the cost of the car and so providing insight into like how batteries are performing out in the real world is something that you know we're starting to do and have very like ground truth data on that doesn't require you know some third party to sort of sign off on it for it to be shared and so like oems to get back to your question like the Smart Ones understand that this is the world that we live in now and they need to be transparent about the product they're producing and a part of that is sharing and making it possible for people to access the data and if you do that then you'll reap the benefits of Greater Trust with consumers and you'll see people start to build on your Hardware platform which as a hardware manufacturer that's like the highest praise that you can get and and so you

know people I I think are are starting to come around to that but it really depends you know you talk to people in the automotive industry and some of them are like I love what you guys are doing I've had my car connected since the beginning like this is awesome you know and then there's other people who are like I hate this like I want you guys to die like if I could sue you into Blan I would we know what we're getting into basically and I think it's easy to do that when you have you're on the right side of history and you're like taking a very customer consumer small like a lot of our users are small business fleets and like we know that they're going into a lot of these transactions being very information disadvantaged and we're fixing that and so obviously people on

the other side of those transactions are not going to like that whether you're a car dealer or an oem or an insurance company but like the Smart Ones are going to realize that's the world we live in now and it's better okay so I just want to make sure that everyone understands how this works like as a user so I can connect the I can download the demo app and connect the demo app to my car if I have the appropriate car like a car that was basically manufactured probably in the last five years works with about 90% of cars that come off the production line today without a hardware device without a hardware okay 100% of Tesla is like a Tesla you can log in in like two minutes and just start you're basically saving your own copy of the data from that car

and we'll pull everything that we possibly can we add support for new vehicles very frequently and we also improve support for existing Vehicles particularly with our Hardware device and when oems open up new API endpoints which is something that some of them are starting to do we'll add support for it very quickly and basically we look at it as like we're building a digital twin of your car that you can use with any app on the network okay I just want to you keep using the term OEM for everyone who doesn't know that's a equip manufacturer he's referring to the car manufacturers okay so I set this up I set up the app or I install the hardware into my car which you've shown a few times it's basically like I don't know like a 2

inch by 2 inch chip that plugs into I'm assuming yeah we have a bigger one the first one's called The autop Pie and the second one is called the macaron we go with a dessert themed name for for each and yeah the the macro is about a third of the size and a third of the cost of the autopi it also uses the helium Network for activities so it's very cheap to keep online and use your own network that we're a big fan right so I don't have to buy a cell phone plan for this device right and we bake the connectivity cost into the cost of the device so this is by far the cheapest way to connect your car to the internet and obviously it has these other benefits like you can earn you know demo rewards and you can you get the app for

any of your cars and increasingly there's also a bunch of exclusive services and discounts and things that you can only get by having a car connected to demo and the goal is to make this like a complete no-brainer of a purchase like it's the best $100 you've ever spent because it'll save you easily you know an order of magnitude more than that over the life of your car um and possibly also allow you to sell your car for more money when you go to sell it the next time because you have all of this historical data on the vehicle and you can show it's been you know properly maintained or you can choose to not share any of that data it's all yours it's not like you know the third party the the other thing that's cool that's worth you mentioning for like the crypto crowd is that we we

create onchain identities for not just the vehicles but also the hardware devices and so the hardware devices basically like a hardware wallet this isn't a big part of it but you can like pay it you can issue it nfts or Collectibles people are starting to build games and apps on the network that allow you to because it's an open developer platform and the user can show up and like log in with their wallet and get all the data from their car you can create you know a road trip game or you know something that's meant to be used on the racetrack we have people that are making mapping games and quests and and that sort of thing and we we've built it to be very open and permissionless and all the necessary components have onchain identities so it's it's very composable in that way amazing okay

you're perfectly seguing into the next part of this conversation which up until now we haven't talked a ton about crypto we've talked a little bit about it but I think it's important to recognize that you did not start demo as a crypto company you later on in your process decided to use crypto and blockchain is that accurate like what I want to convey here is a lot of our listeners and a lot of Founders we speak to are I think that they're often approaching crypto and blockchain from the wrong angle they're saying okay how do I start a crypto company and that's not the objective crypto blockchain it's just a mechanic

to offer better features or to improve the user experience but it's not a company on its own always so far we've seen that a lot because of Defi and then we've also seen it not a lot well we've seen it fail a lot with nfts to be honest right give me a little bit of like the background on do you consider demo a crypto company how did you sort of what made you decide and you mentioned helium before and how you kind of went down that path is that what kind of got you decid to involve crypto in the business business I followed the space for a long time like I bought my first Bitcoin in 2012 and like I didn't obviously didn't hold it on to it but know it was like a like it's been a long journey of watching the space it's not

something that I just like kind of stumbled into I've seen a lot of people like kind of opportunistically try to create some sort of you know crypto and ail iot this or that but you know genuinely like there's this period of time where especially after the ethereum wi paper came out I think it was like 2016 I guess 2015 maybe and I read read it and was like this is awesome like this is a way you know I was working in the transportation space like just thinking about Transit on a day-to-day basis and was like wow we have these like 100 page long contracts with all of our clients that are based on like if this happens then do this and like you could take this contract and make it into a smart contract and like this is something that seems like it's going to

be possible within 10 years and yeah maybe that will end up actually after 20126 seems kind of reasonable for like that portion of the government maybe to be you know starting to run I hope so had this sort of like Insight very early on that it would be possible and and where my interest was in like tying the physical world and the real world into these open user-owned networks and like generally the idea of like I think one of the things that people in the crypto space could afford to do quite a bit more is study things that exist already in the real world like an electric utility is a user owned Network where there's a govern it's a dow like there's usually a governance you know system in place that functions somewhat well it delivers a service to people that they

pay for and is tokenized that you can usually buy equity in it and like there's a lot of these good you know examples from The Real World of stuff that works like that but in a lot of cases is very inefficient because of a lack of these sort of basic Primitives that that crypto can now provide people and and one is like really important in the automotive spaces that we have things to bootstrap off of like devices are already assigned identities by the government and so you can you create a Cil resistant Network by saying okay you can only have one of each VIN number and from a VIN number you can get lots of other data that allows you to verify like this is actually the car the person says it is and you know there's also like just having something like the helium Network that's a more open

Telecom resource allows us to verify data coming from cars and like you know make it very difficult to spoof or game stuff that that's coming in from the connected devices and and so it was a matter not not necessarily of like you said looking at and trying to start a crypto company but realizing that there's an opportunity because of the presence of these networks and how they're becoming more robust and having better developer tooling and performance and cost that you actually could basically remove the back end of a connected vehicle system or big chunk of the back end of a connected vehicle system and replace it with a blockchain and that would offer you much worse performance and terrible user experience but be better in one very important way and that it's neutral and owned by the

users and that would solve a huge problem which was getting developers to trust it and want to build on it and getting us users to feel like they're invested in this ecosystem because they own a piece of it and can you know participate in the governance of it and that was not something that was possible before like that's really all that matters and there's a lot of ways that people could point at something like demo and be like well it doesn't do this it doesn't do that but there's one thing that they can say which is you know the users are in charge and there there's nothing else in the world that that is like that at this point and I think that's going to continue to be quite important especially as the devices connected to to networks like that are doing increasingly more risky things in

or not necessarily risky but like important things in the real world there there are computers that are are making very important decisions that people want visibility into and control over and there's these huge honey pots of connected device control that are they're being established that you can start to push out to the edges in in a network like this more effectively and it's something where we did not set out like this is sort of the best or the this was the worst solution except for all the ones for how to build a network like this and we are ideologically very aligned with a lot of the values that are present in like the ethereum community and even the bit the Bitcoin world to a certain extent although like a lot of those people don't like sort of draw the line at like you know monetary

only Bitcoin don't do anything else with this like yeah and so you know I think it's one of those situations one of the other things I'll say is that you can get into trouble a little bit in picking an idea like this too far like I actually think that there there are a lot of markets that people are trying to apply these principles or this type of architecture too that actually don't really make sense and cars are very unique because they have identities they're really valuable there's lots of other inefficient markets that are based on them and like there aren't that many other use cases like that where it makes sense for cars it really makes sense it's like trillions of dollars worth of assets that you need to bring online and there's you know a bad way to do it which is let the car companies control

the asset after make it there's a good way we just put the users in control and like this is how we do the good way totally yeah so well said Okay I want to break down the two what I see as the two main ways that you guys are using blockchain so you talked a little bit about the car let's just go into some more detail what goes on chain how how is the car brought on chain you mentioned that there's so many and it's it is actually I know luck isn't the right word necessarily but it helps you a lot that there is all these identity Primitives given to car so but tell us how is the car brought on chain what is brought on chain so we wrote a smart contract that's kind of like if you're in the US I don't know if

they say the same thing in can but the the DMV the Department of Motor Vehicles it's like where you go to like register your car you know get a new title for it whatever we wrote a smart contract that's basically like that and it enforces uniqueness so it makes sure that each car is only connected once and we use VIN numbers to do that and and require a certain level of verification before the car can be you know granted this on chain license and that is an nft we don't advertise it as such it's not that important but it shows up in your wallet and you can see it you can make a nice picture for it and give it a name so that represents not ownership of the car although it could in the future but it's ownership of the data from the car

so if you show up to an application and you say I have this in my wallet then you get the data from that car and you can you know make different requests and and you can transfer it to somebody else so that person would then get access to the data from that car you can also just grant access onchain so that you know you could say your wife can have access to these data points from the vehicle but not these and all of that is is an onchain registry there's a name service that we don't use a whole lot today but you know will become more important in the future to you know take the like ZX12 34 and turn it into and car and a lot of that stuff we get for free because it's already built there in in the ethereum world and so yeah

establishing the onchain identity for the vehicle is important we don't put the VIN number on chain but that's part of the um enforcing the uniqueness of the car just the make model and year goes on chain and when I say we this is just you know contributor to the community is adding onchain primitive for trip data so you can bundle up some of the data that's signed by a vehicle and put that onchain to verify like you completed a trip or you did this you know real world action and you can bundle in attestations from other service or devices with Unchained identity so like a helium hotspot saw your car go from A to B and and that's part of this proof of movement primitive that we think is going to be pretty

important to the the network over time where you can get a lot of certainty that something happened in the real world and create basically like consensus on on some real world activity by layering in data from lots of different Oracles that have onchain identities and reputations and and so we've started to build the pieces of that into the network as well and that's a part of being able to issue rewards to the owners of the devices on chain so if you have 10 vehicles in your wallet and they all stay connected to the network in a given week then you get a share of the rewards that are distributed to users today super simple reward algorithm it's not like Bitcoin where that's going to be how it works forever

the users can vote to update the incentives and how the rewards are distributed and there's some great ideas flowing around about how that might happen in in the future and those are largely centered around use cases for the network like people things that people want to build one one example of an early application that is built on the network is there's actually pretty incredible Indie hacker who has a business called coverage critic that is kind of like Yelp for sell networks where they get data and show you like here's where AT&T verise and or T-Mobile provides the best coverage and they have a deal with uh demo users where they're paying for access to aggregated demo user data on a monthly basis and they get access to like the cell network data

that's being transmitted by demo users and then the demo users get the their proportional share of the rewards from from that contract it's basically data services contract each month um and so that's that's one example of how we're you know starting to monetize the network on a very early early stage and then there's also this marketplace where you know for being connected to the network you can go transact with service provider like we have repair pal which is a huge network of of mechanics mostly in the US today but but adding similar services around the rest of the world and in that case when you transact with a partner they have basically like a standing offer to issue you rebate as a user and you get that in the token so it's kind of like an airline reward

point for your car and yeah the vision for the rewards and the token is that over time the incentive shifts from just you know getting the token for simply staying connected to the network which is the case today where you know we're in this very like bootstrapping phase to over time it's going to shift more towards like how much do you contribute back to the network like how much of your spend do you put into partners that are on training demo and how much does that generate in fees and in most cases we think we can help users you know save a pretty substantial amount of their spend by using their collective bargaining power to get better deals with businesses that want to sell them stuff yeah there's sort of two categories to what you talked about there there's the using the token as an

incentive to incentivize user Behavior which we've seen we've seen lots of crypto projects do that many with great success some with not so great success when it comes to airdrop mechanics basically and trying to create hype and then tokens go to zero and there's no reason to well the cost of switching is zero Yeah in our case like the cost of switching is a little higher once you have your car connected so in that way it does like kind of create more loyalty with the users because they bought this device plugged into their car and like right sure you could you know unplug it but like there's benefit to it and and we try to treat users in in the right way when we're building products in the network so so that yeah

I think a lot of the stuff like the airdrop farming and like a lot of the defi stuff where people are like oh we have like you know two million active users on our L2 it's just like how many of those are real people and like how anchored to the real world is that you can't really know but like with demo it's like pretty hard to create you like I'm sure people have figured out how to create a fake vehicle on on demo but I mean we've certainly like tried to invest a lot in making it extremely hard to do and I think it you know it hasn't happened to the same degree that it has happened yeah for sure and then the other thing you mentioned was the use cases and the applications that can be built on top I imagine that the used car

market is a big Market that is sort of ripe for disruption here can you talk a little bit about how demo could be a part of solving that yeah so the way we look at basically all of the markets is what kind of information asymmetry exists and how can we create a more user focused experience and with the used car market like people get taxed with time and most of the dealers or like carvana V or CarMax like the kind of like online retailers that are out there at least in in the US starting to pop up like basically all over the place they benefit from the fact that it's very hard to shop around and it's getting easy easier for consumers but you still

have to like type your VIN number into six different websites and like you know you show up at the dealer and they're like well you know you got this issue and like they try to keep you there for as long as possible and like in in our case like we can share enough data about the vehicle and if there's an intent to sell and this is you know purely talking at the application layer like somebody's using demo mobile this is kind of separate from the demo protocol like right there's the ability because you have all these users online to go and like negotiate with the market and say hey this person wants to sell their car here's some data about it so you know it's real and like you can give a an accurate price like bring them a good price and allow them to get those prices

with one click and like that just in of itself I think is a dramatically better experience and then you start to get into the actual mechanics of how you transfer ownership of a vehicle and that's where you get into like paper documents that are filed with government entities and like title and registration and those are two things that very very clearly should be parts of the government that are turned into smart contracts like there's no doubt in my mind that the DMV should become a smart contract and we've kind of like made the first like tow hold in that world and now other parts of it are starting to be digitized there are companies that have been working on turning the DMV into smart contracts and like I think it's fairly likely that that starts to happen you know West Virginia weirdly in the US

is like now a digital titles Clearing House and like you can you know transfer a vehicle from one state to another much more effectively like in the past it used to take weeks in order for that to happen and so a lot of these identity Primitives of vehicles are becoming more transferable and digiti and as soon as that happens we're going to be at the Forefront of like integrating that into the applications that sit on top of the demo protocol and then you can like literally trade in and out of your car in a day and get a much better price and not have to spend your entire Saturday going driving to six different dealerships and like it's just G to be a more fair and transparent market and the bottom line of all this is like if you put more information into consumer hands

the businesses will come to the smart businesses will figure out how to sell them Stu like it's not we're not worried about that and like anytime you see a business trying to prevent consumers from getting access to their own data it's because they're profiting off of the in like the information asymmetry in some Market already like that is the bottom line whether it's a car dealer or an insurance company or whoever and like you know no matter what anybody says like that you know you're not going to convince me otherwise and so our approach generally is put more data in the user's hand ideally turn that data into information so they know like what is valuable and what they can do with it and then create a fair market on top of that where the rules are clear and there's not one like Arbiter of

decisionmaking and I think all of those pieces exist it's just plugging in the right Integrations and building the apps and getting people on the network and and that's kind of where we're at right now but we have about a fiveyear road map of things to build Unis swap for cars is like a very you know like open SE for cars I guess is probably slightly better totally yeah that's the potential to go peer-to-peer because right now I've purchased a used car but I've always purchased it through a third party I've never done it direct because I'm not a car guy I don't know what I'm buying right fear is huge it's already most of the used car transactions today I mean it's going down but like the use the other thing about the use car market is it's three

times bigger than the new car market so like it's massive and there's a ton of opportunities to give people better financing Services it's also when people Insurance when you're getting a new car and there's a lot of other like you know extended warranties and like other things that consumers just get totally ripped off of and like there's the opportunity to create like very thin margin but you know very scalable digital versions of all of those services that are just reliant on the fact that there's this open market and it's kind of going to be like like defi where like a lot of the margins just get competed away over time but you know the person that ends up winning is the participant in the transaction and that's good that's you it's good yeah that's what you want okay I just want to

dream big for a second you said you have a five-year road map and I don't know whether these could be things on your road map or maybe this is beyond you know if you had unlimited budget and unlimited resources what would you build what do you see being possible down the road I mean we definitely want to invest more one thing that we've said we're going to do next year is ADD video support to the protocol so allow people to add dash cam and we've done a lot of like very productive early experiments with dash cam mapping and there's you know some some interesting projects that kind of exist in the same space is demo that are doing they're building like aftermarket self-driving systems for cars and open sourcing them and like making it a lot more transparent so like

getting pushing further and faster into the robotics world and and like making sure that those capabilities can exist on top of demo and that a lot of them can be more open like I think one of the things that's recing they becoming true if you're following the news around self-driving cars like basically getting kicked out of San Francisco or at least Crews getting kicked out of San Francisco and and and elsewhere um people have huge trust issues with AI in and like robotics is like the physical manifestation of that and so you know being able to help like get out in front of that and create a more open and transparent like operating environment for those types of systems was part of the original vision of demo and we we

took this very like practical approach of like well let's get a bunch of cars online first and then they'll start to get smarter over time we can build services but like that's that's the next phase for this and we want to make sure that there's like you know kind of a smooth and orderly transition to that world and people can be in control throughout like there's not going to just be some Robo taxi Fleet that like shows up on your streets without your permission and is like doing all kinds of crazy and like you're not going to have some say into that or visibility into what's going on and you know I think along those lines like a lot of people in the crypto world are very like anti- establishment anti-government like I I've seen you know just having worked in the public transit space like the

government does a lot of important like really you know provide a lot of important critical services and like I don't agree with all the things that they they do but like there's certain aspects of like you know government regulation or government services that I think should be brought on chain really fast we talked about the DMV and like you know public transportation and like creating more shared public goods I think Deo actually can make a much healthier environment for that when it comes to Mobility specifically whether it's like getting a new title for your car or like operating a more efficient bus system in your city or know creating like better on demand rides and then yeah we also talked about like better peer-to-peer services in marketplaces like if you look at something like turo or get around you know you have these

very like web to companies that are allowing people to share their cars but I use turo a lot and I look at the take rate and and what they're providing for the 30% or so that they take of of somebody's rental and you know I think that there's definitely a way for somebody to create a much more consumer friendly version of that on top of demo and I'd love to live you know I live in a neighborhood fortunately where like I have a neighbor who has a truck and like I get to borrow it from him but you know creating much more of those kind of like local like hyper local markets for people to share Vehicles is a really good idea um and something that it's just been impossible to create because there isn't enough of this like shared you know digital connectivity layer that

people can build on without having to know how to like you know create a hardware device and like a mobile app and all stuff like you know just yeah so I think all these things are are possible for us it's all about like kind of sequencing them in the right order and finding the right teams to build them on top of the network and as we're opening up the developer platform it becomes a lot more possible to like parallelize these things and run experiments alongside each other and and up until now we've really just been like get the core thing working and then get it to the point where anybody actually can build an app on top of Deo and so yeah that I mean by the end of the year I'll say that we'll have you know damn close to like checking off that box

and be able to get into some of these more exciting things that's awesome it's amazing how it all comes back to trust like when you talk about the like an example like turo and sharing your vehicle I imagine for those who share their vehicle they don't have any idea really what happens with the vehicle while they're sharing it right but if is requiring telematics now and that's cool for us because a lot of our users are actually operating tough fleets and so this is their telematic like this is is how they connect a car and they get all the data from it like so that's cool and it is like a beach head into that into that world and like we're not necessarily opposed to turo we think that there's a way to make that market more fair yeah totally we don't really love the Dynamics of like one company

having their finger on the scale of a market like that and I mean that's when you know they're going to get disrupted let's say I'm using the demo app and I put the hardware unit in my car what data is it going to give me could it impact like my driving could it like like would it tell me things that would impact the way I use my car we give you everything that we get today and so for certain cars that's more than others and we you know one thing that we hear a lot from people is like I didn't know that I needed an oil change and so with you know there's this very like kind of basic like maintenance you know that we we give to we're also starting to generate more intelligent notifications from the data so like when you hit 10,000 miles like hey it's time to do

this this and this get a oil change you know you have 40,000 miles you probably need new tires or you have this card EVS need new tires faster than others so like that's something that we're we're thinking a lot about is like giving people you know not this new thing that they have to like check in on all the time but just like this is your buddy now like you don't have to worry about your car stuff because all your data is in there but like you don't even need to look at it if you don't want it's just going to like come out and service itself to you when it's time you know you hit 50,000 miles or 100,000 miles a lot of people sell their car at that point so like here are some offers if you don't want them like whatever um and

so yeah we kind of think about like you know certainly um one thing that that we're looking at adding to the the mobile app is like the concept of like trip data and insights so like you drove this trip here's how much gas you use like here's how that compares to other people with the same car here's a lot of parents connect this connects to demo because they have teen drivers and they want to know like what was the top speed on my kids drive and so like there's a ton of different use cases and it really depends on like whether you're a small business owner or a tough Fleet you know owner I'm sort of of the opinion just thinking about like I'm and surprisingly not really a car guy I'm more like a car nerd that makes sense and so I I don't

really care about like my engine performance or whatever but I do care about what my car is worth and like I think about trading it and selling it getting a new car like you know kind of that addd with that so like everybody's different and our goal is to try to provide like the the mobile app in particular to make that like kind of the one siiz fits all you can sort of opt into getting different notifications and you can use thirdparty services and it's a jumping off point into to using a game or getting cheaper insurance or selling your car whatever and one thing that we've started to mess around with that I get pretty excited about is the potential I don't know if you watched the open AI developer day that they had yesterday but they're like talking about you can now create like your own custom

AI agent that's trained on some third part you know some unique data that you're bringing to the table and like that's going to be pretty powerful for Dem users you're going to be able to like query your car data in natural language and say you know where was it what where was my car like three weeks ago on Thursday like show me the the data on a map and like you're going to be able to kind of like spin up these you know very custom queries for certain questions and and also plug in the marketplace and have this you know kind of like intelligent agents that are doing your bidding with this important asset in your life so so I guess it's your original question it depends on what kind of car you have and we're working on making that that more clear and also you better for people or you

know better for people up front before they buy the device um and there's also a lot of work to be done in terms of like improving that over time it's not going to be like Ford pass where the app stays the same forever like we're constantly investing in servicing your data in more unique ways I love that you brought up Ai and like can't have this episode without asking you a little bit about autonomous vehicles and where you think that is and I think what's most interesting to me is trust is such a a a core pillar of what you're builing and blockchain allows trust in a new way and we've talked a lot on our podcast about how I think every AI came along and everybody in crypto is like oh no there

goes all our VC funding right yeah but I think the thing that we keep pushing is AI really is going to expedite the need for blockchain because we need verified truth now even more than we needed it before because we don't trust AI whether that be an autonomous vehicle or whether that be a piece of software there's a real lack of trust and so if you can use blockchain to bring that trust back in then it makes a lot of sense what is the current state of aut autonomous vehicles and is there a role for demo to play there yeah so I think we're interested and what we have built is like a more solid foundation to create and deploy

some of these applications some of these AI powered applications at scale in a way that can be rooted in trust be trusted by by the users and you see this a little bit like like I get the Insight that the folks who are building worldcoin are pulling on I'm not sure that that's you know I think there's there might be some PR issues around like that being so closely tied to open AI in a lot of ways but like that's kind of a separate kind kind of a separate issue and you could think of demo very like Demo's kind of like World coin for your car where it's like you know there's this you you bring it online you verify that it's real in a certain way and for us like instead of having to like scan your eyeball and it's just you scan the port in your car and you go

register the VIN number and that you know in in our case like create opens up this whole design space for building an an application that can run on any car and I think the most compelling application that you can run on any car by far is going to be the ability to make it drive itself and that's going to roll out in a way that people don't necessarily expect like I think cars are going to park themselves far more quickly than they're going to drive themselves you know on local streets and you mean by that well do today so when you look at like what's being the the capabilities that are being put into modern cars like even Tesla today they have Smart summon feature they haven't invested a whole lot in but like they're supposedly rolling out rolling out a new version and I think we'll we'll figure

out and maybe Deo will be part of the solution to this this was something that we worked on quite a bit in the early days but sheld for a variety of reasons that's kind of a separate podcast in of itself but like there are certain aspects of the a trip that can be automated a lot more effectively than others today and Highway way driving is like extremely easy to it's basically a solved problem but the issues are in regulations and Driver monitoring and the fact that there's lots of other human drivers on the road and like every once in a while you'll just like encounter like ladder like falling off the back of a truck at 80 miles an hour in front of you so that part of the drive is like basically easy to automate solve problem from a robotic standpoint but like we need to figure out the like

social implications of it the like local driving is incredibly difficult you see this in San Francisco like even today just came out Cruz had an intervention every two miles when they were driving around in San Francisco remotely and like right you know that I I don't know how you solve that problem from a social standpoint even technologically like wh's far ahead of them but like even there it's a tremendously difficult problem and then you have like the parking problem and that is actually quite easy to solve and like you're typically operating at very low speeds and like the person is often not even in the car so like creating an experience where somebody like gets out of their car at the airport or like outside of their apartment complex and like the car goes and Parks itself is really like more of a coordination Challenge and

being able to create shared infrastructure so like the parking garage knows it has an empty spot in on the third floor in the back right corner and it can communicate that to the car and the car can pick up that message and then say okay well I can like go pay $5 and like go drive over here at five miles an hour and then I'll come back the user presses the button in the app and shows up like so that kind of experience is like really just an infrastructure and coordination Challenge and getting all these systems to like Network together and that's I think where demo can solve a lot of the issues is because we create this you know unique veriable onchain identity for different Hardware devices not just cars but like the ticket machine and the parking garage the arm goes up and like

you know the framework that we've established for vehicles can be used to create any of those types of experiences and we went down the rabbit hole of like can we make shared like sort of perception system for cars so that it's basically like video cameras in a garage that are watching the garage and instead of you know so you're driving a a car that doesn't even itself have to be autonomous but it knows like there's a person around the corner and so slow down or stop and like kind of local network is is aware of the state of things rather than the car having to be aware and so I think people are starting to come back walk back from this like Grand Vision of you know level five autonomy is what they call it like the car takes you anywhere at any time and

like it's this all- knowing computer to like hey maybe we should just invest in some shared infrastructure that can actually deliver these like very concrete use cases for specific applications and provide value to people and like make them want to pay more for a car which is where all the automakers are coming back to the oems are realizing that and in the meantime like prob and AI will help to automate driving your car down the highway or you know maybe some of the like local roads travel but it's certainly not going to happen in the way that you know even I would have assumed it it would in 2016 where people just looked at the progress and were like oh it's just going to continue like this forever yeah expectations have met reality there yeah and you know I think I haven't seen anyone else propose a more like

reasonable solution to the problem of how do you get all these different machines to coordinate in a transparent way and the one of the problems and the thing that holds us back when we're trying to have some of these conversations and it's not something that we're like prioritizing like creating that automated parking experience is not possible for a variety of reasons today but if demo gets up to the scale of even a million Vehicles like people will start to I think really consider that as as an alternative and so that that's a place we could find ourselves in in the next you know 18 24 months or so and so like we haven't seen somebody else propose a more viable solution and we know what we need to do to like get from from here to there and I think that's something that that will

happen it's just is going to happen a little bit more slow motion than than people are used to in the tech World well I hope that all of our listeners who have listen to this episode are going to take the step to helping demo provide that a million vehicles and being part of this how can our listeners get involved how can they set get set up on demo yeah I mean we we made this new hardware device with an excellent Hardware partner to provide you know $100 price point that keeps you connected for three years and so you can pre-order it right now maybe by the time the episode comes out you be a we actually be shipping them they know it's going to happen in the next next couple of weeks here the the first units are going to start to get into people's

hands from a like consumer perspective and then there's a good chance that if you have a newer car you can just connect download demo Mobile log in connect your wallet or use the the inapp wallet to to create a vehicle kind of like you know you're joining a gang it's like a web 3 AAA you know like you're getting in and if it's only going to keep getting better and and we're continuing to build more Integrations and you know you're going to see some some real progress on the mobile app and if you're a fleet operator and you have hundreds of vehicles like we provide a pretty compelling Fleet Management solution today and obviously you know there's tons of upside in terms of contributing and and joining the network today and I think that's something that's going to continue into the future so yeah get on board and message us on

Twitter demoore network if you have any issues getting connected any thoughts about the app we also have a pretty active Discord Community people sharing car tips and talking about all kinds of stuff in there building apps do you get token incentives if you connect with the app or do you only get the token incentives if you install the hardware you get both and if you're connected with the hardware device today you're getting more rewards you also get rewards from some of the applications that are using the aggregated data from right from the hardware device today there's basically an incentive for connecting at at the Baseline it varies based on you know what kind of vehicle you have but right yeah it's I actually I mean the the

rewards are issued weekly and I don't like follow waste CL on that level but I know it's it's worth it it's kind of like an airline reward point for your car like nobody's it's not like one of those crypto projects where it's like to the moon like everybody's getting rich it's more we're just like kind of participating in this user OWN Network this sort of like ambient data sharing rewards happening and then yeah that's over time the goal is really to make it into something on the you know Marketplace and services side where like the more of your car span that you direct into the network like you can actually save like most people spend about $12,000 a year on their car and we think we can you know at scale save people like between 15 and 20% of that so like that's that's pretty meaningful

money back in people's pockets and one of the things that a lot of our users value is time savings too and and we intend to provide a lot of that as well I love it okay before we wrap I just want to do a quick speed run some fun questions first question what's an nft you'll never sell well I've got one of the first nfts I mean one of the first cars ever connected to demo and I think it is number three my dad had number one so I I plugged his car in just because he had an EV so I would hope he doesn't sell that I don't think he knows how I'm not going to sell mine ever even if I sell the car I'll just keep I'll keep the nft so that brings up an interesting question about the how the nft and the

car are connected yeah when you sell they're not connected so when you sell it's a key to the data from the car when it was connected when you owned it so if you right if somebody else shows up and you know plugs a device into that vehicle and and tries to Mint it they can you know start over from that point but yeah I've got I've got one of one of the first of my Toyota RP 4 in the future we do Vision a world we' be able to attach some of the like ownership Primitives to the nft and I think account abstraction and a lot of the other tools are going to be necessary to make that you don't want somebody to like steal your wallet and steal your car yeah but yeah having physical possession of the car is enough to bring it online and demo it so that can kind

of like allow you to create a new starting point for the vehicle that point right and then if you did sell the vehicle you could if you wanted also pass the nft over which would give all the data of that car to the new owner or I guess you could not you could do that and and some people have have done that and it does you know theoretically increase the the value of the car and and the history I mean what one tool that we've imagined is a way to kind of like roll up the data so you don't get to see like everywhere that you've ever been but you get to see here's how many times here's how many miles you drove all connected here's the oil changes you got like kind of that like Carfax style history and yeah that that piece of it

is going to require a little bit more development work today the simplest thing to do is like you get it you own all the data you can show up to a third party app and and use it cool okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it connect your car to demo QR code yeah billion people there's there's 1.4 billion cars in the world so hopefully that would get a good chunk of them on there I don't know I'd have to think of something very like catchy and creative yeah definitely it would be demo related at this point it I love it yeah awesome Andy thank you so much for the time very excited about everything you guys are building these are the crypto use cases that we took us a little while to get here we really

spent some time on the nft Mania and maybe got a little sidetracked with just making jpegs worth $100,000 for no reason but some of them are I don't know I would still buy I think crypto Punk might be up there but yeah for them no and look there's it's one of those things with the crypto world where it's like just there's so many like side quests and kind of like duplicative activities out there they like purely digital world but once you get anchored back into physical reality yeah it's a very useful tool 100% Andy thanks so much for the time today thanks for having me Jay thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it

there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one