DappCon 2023: Althea Ifi: Infrastructure Finance Empowers New Ways For RWA - Deborah Simpier

Transcript

hi everyone um thank you so much for being here and I'm honored to be on the stage with so many great speakers and thank you all for those that are still here at the end of this long hot day um my name is deborra senier I am the uh CEO of Hawk networks and the co-founder of Alia and I'm excited to share what we've been building in infrastructure connectivity and system design over the last it's been five years so Alia is um the payment layer powering infrastructure and connectivity it is machine to machine microtransactions and payments um it is uh system design and

infrastructure and connectivity and if we think about how Legacy payments are um settled today they're very manual they're very human um there's emails and purchase orders and net 30 invoices and maybe that's worked in the past but they're incredibly inefficient and it certainly won't work in um the future economy of uh autonomous vehicles robotic devices you know um connected smart cities you can't um how we say you can't uh net 30 a smart tractor your a smart trash can right the idea that seems a bit even ridiculous um and so Alia is um the connectivity layer that that um

that sort of addresses that problem and I want to kind of take you all back to when we started late 2017 2018 because aa's approach is very unique in this ecosystem uh many blockchain projects start off by sort of build it and they will come or they look at incentivizing and bootstrapping um mechanisms for infrastructure and then moving on uh you know kind of hoping customers will arrive but if you think about where Alia was in 2017 we were very focused on this problem in particular where we in the US one out about every four people right there's infrastructure they spend 100 billion dollars over the last 101 15 years in infrastructure um granting aan to build fiber 5G networks so forth but

yet one in every four people don't have access to the internet of their home so so why was this I mean it's not because you know the the isps are are evil of course they'd love to have the market share um this is 25% of the market they're leaving behind and so we started to look at how the systems were designed and you see a lot of this kind of thing so this is a map um of us Broadband infrastructure and and they've done this throughout with the uh the US and you can see there's lots of these little green dots which are connected homes right next to dots that are red that don't have connectivity and pretty much anywhere in the US you're going to find a very similar map and probably most places in the world I think I think

there are some more modernized cities but for the most part this is a pretty similar um you know look at the Last Mile and it's because there's these sort of silos right there's a rental system and you know if you need to have a competitor they got to do a whole other fiber optic cable and it's just sort of intractable and then the Opex doesn't work they're very debt heavy the cost to acquire customers is quite high but we looked at the core of the internet um and when you look at kind of the internet exchange when you go deeper when you sort of decouple infrastructure and service and you're in the internet exchange the way the sort of carriers charge each other kind of almost um you know uh programmatically then you

created a bandwidth marketplace where bandwidth is a commodity and services decoupled and what's happened there is year-over-year costs have gone down and year-over-year capacity for bandwidth has gone um up so we realized that it wasn't an infrastructure problem it was a systemic problem and so that's the Alo was sort of core founded on the principle that we could remove the manual friction by changing how we think about payments um interestingly enough so Alia's networks are very different than the traditional kind of Legacy what we think of as an ISP we get to re-envision what we think of as a an infrastructure

provider the um the infrastructure itself is open access and decoupled from the service layer so new kinds of entities can own infrastructure many different kinds of entities can own infrastructure and that service layer um can be local and separate be a different type of entity this is very similar to where what we think about with real estate too which also allowed many different people to invest in real estate because the landlord is different entity than the property manager um this is uh kind of based on two kind of core fundamentals with Alia so the first is machine to machine payments so meaning that your you know

device or um running that node in the network whether that's a telecom Tower or your router in your home it doesn't matter which it's still going to have an account and it's going to programmatically meter and make payments automatically and that can be extended to any kind of device um and then the other core principle is what we call Price aware routing protocol so how do devices talk to one another and this is pretty exciting this is where we really get into market dynamics and can do really exciting things because every Alia router has on one side cost and the other side um latency or quality so on a dynamic minute by minute basis you can make the market for that um for your choice of cost or latency and so what

that does is create a holistic design it's Hardware agnostic we can do fiber optic 4G uh 5G fixed Wireless um and it all works in a seamless sort of environment and um it also allows for us to do really need things like this because it is Hardware agnostic you can really re-envision what you think about for um uh ISP what is an ISP um for example you know some of the biggest users of connectivity are Enterprise um we worked with an eveve company that shared with us that they are looking at several billions of dollars of connectivity cost over the next 10 years um simply for over there

updates for their vehicles um basic connectivity connectivity of charging stations when you're talking about that kind of capital then you can see where it becomes you know really dynamic or really compelling that they can then own their own infrastructure um utilize the Alia platform and receive Revenue um while well someone else is doing the um the service side of it traditionally if some before kind of an ala platform came along you'd have to do both you'd have to be the person answering the 3: a.m.

call and doing Services as well as um providing infrastructure access so what we have discovered that is over the last four or five years is we've built together with these Enterprise clients with people in rural areas in urban environments where payments needed to be much more flexible um it turns out Utility payments uh uh the main problem with actually paying those is is of course cost is component to it but it's flexibility being able to prepay in fact 72 million people in the US have prepaid phones simply for that flexibility and that's that market that that 25% that we're solving for internationally and

rurally but there's a bit of a problem with scaling that so right we've doubled the number of states that we're in we're growing going um we have more networks to be built than can be built because access to Capital and Telecom networks is difficult it's another one of those friction pieces so we encountered um the same sort of intract or the same sort of difficulty in the frictions of the interconnections that existed in the machine to machine payments also existed in access to Capital right now if you wanted to invest in real estate or invest in Telecom or infrastructure you'd have to go buy some shares in a company right it all comes together it's very hard you have to vet the company

there's some risk involved with that and for most uh you know accredited investors even it's quite untenable you you're not really going to be able to do that and for most different types of entities mid midsize entities is also you know takes a long time to do as well um so this is where we looked at um that kind of next evolution of Altha which takes and tokenizes is the revenue uh associated with those healthy accounts so that telecom tower that piece of infrastructure that Revenue that is um uh being earned programmatically we're actually taking and tokenizing that as well and so by doing that we are um removing a lot of the risk because we

have the transparency of that tokenized asset and that that asset then can produce uh can um participate in Lending borrowing buying and selling um and and that that Capital the kind of crowdfunding can also happen as well too so many different people could um come together to build a network as well so it adds that flexibility in order so that Builders and that Capital can meet and you can also do really fun things like this so once that asset is tokenized on chain um then you know pretty much any of the kind of

defi uh tools that we think about can be utilized for these infrastructure assets um you could pull them together in a pool like this um you could um do collateralized lending uh that's getting paid back programmatically with that Revenue occurring you can um maybe even use Telecom assets to collateralize a stable coin and all of the transparency uh programmability uh and Open Access that permissionless access that we think about for um defi can meet infrastructure Telecom connectivity assets and this is really

what we call infrastructure financing or IFI um and that like again that's so the permissionless trustless and transparency that we um have in defi meeting the ability to build fund operate on the infrastructure in side and you know we we've been talking about this in broadband that's where we found our Market originally um that's where we proved out the thesis but you know globally infrastructure utilities is is a large market and this can be anything you know we're talking about metering billing machines you know you're talking Energy Water infrastructure um of course Telecom is a big sector of that as well and um so we think this is uh a very sort of exciting uh development

and it feels like it's the right time this is really where we're starting to think about the breakdowns in multiple different systems you know the same sort of friction of interconnection that's happening in Telecom is existing in power grids as well and the same tooling where many different people can own infrastructure and um the revenue can pass through or the infrastructure can be Finance is basically the same there's not a lot of differences there um so uh not only do we think the solutions are now here we think the time is actually right for it another thing that's very interesting is we think that this will be driven a lot by autonomous and Robotics um I spent a lot of time in the

midwest recently we've got a 5G Farm there but something that's interesting about that demographic is the um the age of farmers was around 70 years old and I think this is pretty Global I don't think this is just us but um and the young people are leaving so there are no humans to work farms in about a decade so having autonomous vehicles that then can make payments in real time is not just a luxury it's going to be a necessity and we think this will push machine to machine transactions and infrastructure Finance forward so in the future we envision that payments can be made in

space and time so think about the the farmer uh who who has that automous vehicle one of the things that's really exciting about what radio can do Beyond providing connectivity so that farmer might have his own althia network he's earning some revenue for it it's offsetting his cost but he can also um triangulate that position so he can know when that you know truck full of corn is moving through a certain space in time and that could Auto automatically create a payment um you know uh as that truck sort of moved through and filled up um and that could what's neat about that is once that payment is on chain then you

can think about different ways of Revenue sharing perhaps there was a lot of investors that came together to grow that corn and then as that truck moves through fills up with corn that payment um happens simultaneously then they're paid off automatically and what's neat about this is that it starts to change the ux from how humans manually interact with things and all of the problems with humans manually interacting all the friction all the time all the labor all the mistakes all the risk to the ux for machine to machine and that's where we can get into the programmability um where things can be distributed and most

importantly where many different new types of entities can participate in this economy so where we used to think of infrastructure as um primarily the role of government uh or large monopolistic entities because it was hard to coordinate it was hard to acquire the kind of capital it would take to build these networks now we can in a vision where many different new entities can participate in these these markets have leverage and have choice and um you know that's what we're excited about in the future for all um and we welcome folks to participate uh with us uh please we have a hackathon going on right now um we have Discord

and Twitter um please follow uh follow us there and um uh thanks thanks [Applause] again thank you very much that was super exciting do we have anyone with some questions right up here at the front uh thank you very much for the presentation it's super interesting um

really love it uh but one thing I got to ask uh the name suggest that this is a layer one solution ution because it's called A1 um why is it layer one why didn't you build it as a layer two that's a great question so I certainly and it's think one that we grapple with as well so I actually think as the future of blockchain evolves it'll be more of a multi-chain architecture an overarching architecture that utilizes many different pieces of modular blockchains um as it sort of scales um for now a few of the things that are very important to us are in finality um and being able to have transaction ordering and having some of the

configurability on the um on the uh block space side um those are things that we've been thinking about for quite some time there's of course you know decentralization as well on the Node infrastructure um so that it's resilient you oftentimes see lots of anything from rpcs to uh Rel layers and things like that go down so I think there's a thought that um there's a resiliency to decentralization that we've always really held pretty close um but I I think you know what we're seeing in blockchain evolve is is is definitely course bridging architecture but more of a modular interoperable set so I I think what will'll um especially as the marketplaces for the nft start to evolve

um we'll we'll see a a much more interoperable um Viewpoint now on the L L1 side another thing that we were hoping to do is actually have an evm build environment um which of course can be done on a lay or two as well but um many of the kind of Enterprise clients that we've talked to have wanted to have you know certain incentive tokens or maybe it's a local currency or whatever there's there's an idea to have you know uh um tokens sort of interact if that makes sense got one more over here you talk about microtransactions uh are they um happening every every month or it's like streams of money that that goes all all along every every second

let's say so yeah the micro trans they're actually microtransactions um and that's also what's really kind of interesting because they are microtransactions they are happening you know minute by minute or you know they're 20 cents 50 cents a dollar um but because of that we also can have a very flexible fee structure most people actually accept a pretty large fee um right around like right now it's around 10% and that's really what's going to fund a sustainable um node uh whatever that you know blockchain architecture looks like that's what's going to help fund that right right now we we um we see a lot of inflationary tokens right trying to boost up the ecosystem and there's no real Revenue but what's nice about these microtransactions and it creates a

really healthy you know Revenue stream and actually it's um uh compared to uh the rest of kind of the demand site or or decentralized physical infrastructure alth is right right there at the top basically with lier in terms of how much you know um chain-based Revenue in terms of the transactions is happening okay thank you any other questions if not then we'll thank the speaker again and we'll be back in five minutes