Why GPS Needs Crypto to Evolve | Mike & Christopher, GEODNET

The United States, it's interesting, the infrastructure in the United States for high-precision navigation is pretty poor. GeoNet is really leading the way to get a dense, fully modernized network in the United States very quickly. And so I go to conferences and international conferences and people who are trying to export equipment, they're always like, well, I can't, you know, I can't get anything in the United States. It's the worst. It's the most expensive with the least coverage. And here we are. We're approaching full coverage in the United States.

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Hey, thanks, Jano. Good, good to be here.

Thanks, thanks for having us.

Yeah, yeah. So the context for this is I've been seeing Santi subtly tweet about this thing that he invested in called Geodnet, and then he's been talking to me about it for, for, for months at this point on Telegram and just on our conversations. And I know very, very little about Geodnet. And so I basically just said, look, let's have, let's have Mike on the show. Chris, I know you brought up Geodnet to me in separate conversations. You guys are really excited about them. At CoinFund. So Mike, I'm going to ask some really dumb questions to kick off this podcast. What is Geodnet? Let's start with the most basic of the questions.

Sounds good. So Geodnet, first of all, it's an acronym and it stands for the Global Earth Observation Decentralized Network. And it's a network of what we call satellite miners that are providing fundamental infrastructure to satellite navigation systems and allowing for people to get high precision highly accurate location on their devices, be it everything from mobile phones to core infrastructure building devices like tractors and cranes and excavators on construction sites. So a whole wealth of real-world applications utilizing our infrastructure.

Nice. Seems like something not everyone off the street could go build. Why are you like, how do you know how to build this?

Well, I've been in the positioning and location industry, navigation industry, my whole career, and this is one of the kind of problems that's been there for a long time. So these satellites are deep in space and they travel— signals travel through the atmosphere. The atmosphere is a chaotic— it's electrically active. The ionosphere and the troposphere are electrically active, and it causes distortions to the signals, which then reduce the accuracy and reliability of this of the system, the satellite navigation system that we all use every day. People have been trying to figure out a way to scale up a solution to it for years. And what we found is that, you know, it's extremely expensive to try to do this in the Web2 way. In fact, myself and one of the co-founders worked on it trying to build out infrastructure in the Web2 way, and we quickly realized it wasn't scalable. What blockchain and Deepin bring to the party is a way to build out this infrastructure. So it's really new infrastructure that's being created around the world. For modernized, what we call satellite navigation, and which is in layman's terms GPS. But it, you know, we got into it from the point of view of we wanted to, you know, make these systems more reliable and more accurate in a way that was scalable. And blockchain and Web3 really provide an incredible solution to do that.

Before getting into the crypto side of things, Mike, what is the problem with GPS? Because like for me, like GPS works pretty well on my phone, you know? So like what is the problem we're facing?

Yeah, the problem with GPS is, uh, you know, from your perspective it looks pretty good. There's actually a lot of tricks going on behind the scenes, and including use of data from augmentation networks already, even in your phone. That's not providing you centimeter accuracy, but your phone wouldn't boot up if it weren't for a global terrestrial network like GeoNet. One of the data products that a network like GUS provides is called the satellite ephemeris, and that's what's letting you get that location in a couple seconds. I don't know if you recall back before, um, these types of techniques had been pioneered and you bought a Garmin Nuvi and you would go, yeah, I said you would turn the Nuvi on, you would wait for 10 minutes, right, before that thing would give you a position. That's what it's like without augmentation. So what GeoNet is, is a highly advanced form of augmentation that provides not only speed but also accuracy improvements. Um, the, the, the reason that the accuracy is not great is because there's variable delays. You can think of They call it trilateration or triangulation, right? It's a classic time-of-flight measurements from the satellite to your, to your phone. There's a distance, um, that distance, uh, is, you know, you divide by light speed, you get the time delta, right? So you solve for that to get your position relative to the satellites. Unfortunately, there's variable delays. It's not a straight speed-of-light type of thing. When it goes— when those signals travel through the ionosphere and troposphere, they experience variable delays, you have to compensate that out if you want to get the best accuracy. To do that, you need observations. That's why we call it the Global Earth Observation Decentralized Network, right? Global Earth Observation Decentralized Network is because you need those observations everywhere. Space weather is changing all the time. As we just saw, there was a huge solar storm that created even unusually large activities, but it's ongoing all the time. It's like the wind, it's like the rain, you know, there's always changes in the ionosphere. To be able to compensate those out, provide that reliable high-precision lock to GPS, you need to compensate for those factors. As you look at applications that involve AI and spatial intelligence, things like autonomy, things like drones, things like automation for productivity purposes in, in the field, you need precision. Without augmentation from a network like GeoNet, you're looking at, you know, 2 to 3 meters, and in British terms, 10 feet, you know, it's pretty big. And if you just sit there and watch, that position will drift. You come back the next day, the position will be somewhere else by, you know, 2, 3 feet. It's always— everything is moving all around. And if you want to lock on and map something and repeatedly get to a certain position on the ground, you need, you need much more precision than that. Our system delivers sub-inch accuracy. So it's a, it's really an order, two orders of magnitude improvement and precision.

Chris, I can't help but wonder hearing Mike explain this. So I know about your time in the Marine Corps. Does your time in the Marine Corps and then you guys really understanding this investment and this project have any overlap there?

Man, beyond. So I actually started in the military at the Naval Academy, and one of the things that gets drilled into your head in the military is you always need to know where you are. So at the Naval Academy, we started— we start— we studied, uh, celestial navigation where we'd have to do star shots, use all these different books, um, really tough course actually to find out where you were. And there's like, when you step back, and this was just drilled into my brain over the years, like, it's really, really important to know where you are. And is 3 meters good enough? Is 2 meters good enough? I think as we start unpacking some of the applications here, the answer is no, it's not good enough. And that's what kind of what the light bulb was for me. Years later, I was trained as a survey officer in the Marine Corps, like, and again, accuracy is so, so important. I think as you move forward, you know, the applications that you can see with this technology are profound. Let's start with precision agriculture. Right. And I'd love to unpack this at length. This technology, RTK technology, has been around since the 1990s. And I think— I'm sure Mike will explain it better than me. But if you're a farmer and you want to plant your crops, do you want to plant them to 3 meters? No, you need accuracy. You need centimeters to be able to plow and to be able to spray. And we can talk about why decentralization is so powerful maybe later. What about like automated driving? Like Do you wanna be accurate to 3 meters? No, you're probably gonna get in an accident. I think a centimeter's a lot better. Like, what about AR/VR? Like Pokémon GO, love it to death. But as you get more advanced in gaming, like, isn't centimeter accuracy better? And so you start unpacking, you know, amongst other things, the value of going from 3 meters to a centimeter. Like, I think the opportunity here is pretty material.

Yeah, so Mike, maybe we can get into the crypto side of things. Why did it, why did it not work to build this company in a Web2 manner? You mentioned that in a sentence. Why didn't it work?

Yeah, so people have been trying it for a long time and have built out networks that are on the order of 5,000 nodes. It's notable that within 2 years, GeoNet now is at 7,000 nodes. So we've been able to do what's taken industry 20 years to do. And in 2 years, we've been able to build that with more consistency. Reliability in the sense that all of our stations are uniform, which is something that's super important for the, the space. People love to have a consistent uniform network of stations like GeoNet as opposed to all different kinds and makes and models of stations out there, which is what comprises the Web2. It doesn't work because it's super expensive and, and very time-consuming. So we looked at doing it in the Web2 way, and even you, the receiver hardware, even the infrastructure of the station were free. When you go do it the Web2 way, you're contracting individual people, typically like American Tower, Crown Castle, self-storage locations. These are the places that people put cellular infrastructure. Those guys want anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 per year for rent to start with, and you need to get a very good location. A lot of these places, like a cellular tower, is not an ideal location for a GNSS reference station because, um, there's a lot of, you know, cellular bands are very near the GPS bands in terms of RF. So you have a very high-power thing transmitting right next to your very sensitive thing. It's not ideal. You would need to be very tip-top location on a cell tower, which is the most expensive place. Then you need to get permits, then you need to pull internet. It quickly balloons into a huge capital infrastructure project, which is, is extremely expensive. Running into the billions and tens of billions of dollars to get to the network size that we want to get to. And it's very time-consuming and it takes years and years to build this type of infrastructure out. And then finally, you have like sort of how do you do it on a global basis, right? So one of the things I think really attracts the Web2 side to our project is that it is the word permissionless and that people can add nodes to the network where coverage is needed. They can do it quickly. They can do it in a way that they can count on the quality. The protocol itself makes a bunch of guarantees to, to the users of the network that the data that they will get is precise data. There's 24/7 monitoring stations that are removed. That's all part of the protocol that then in turn releases rewards. So that infrastructure, that blockchain infrastructure is actually kind of a fundamental element to solving the problem. Trying to just blindly put up stations and pay people rent, it just doesn't scale. I mean, it results in really terrible economics for the marketplace.

Hmm.

What, what is the, what is the marketplace? Like every, every deep in company, right, has two sides. You've got the supply and demand. What is that for you guys?

Well, broadly speaking, the marketplace is the GPS marketplace, right? So we're working with companies from the chipset level down, making GPS chips all the way through to end users at construction sites who are trying to survey to sub-inch accuracy to make permanent drawings for a building. Across all that, anyone who's using, you know, satellite-based location is— all the players in that ecosystem are potential customers and participants in the GeoNet ecosystem. That market, broadly speaking, is $200 billion now and growing very rapidly. The satellites, a lot of new satellites have gone up. There's a future with low Earth orbit satellites. Those will also have a very fundamental need for GeoNet infrastructure. to, to manage the ionosphere and tropospheric effects that we talked about earlier. They're even more pronounced with low Earth orbit satellites. So the field of satellite navigation is just growing rapidly. The use cases are from consumer through some of the most advanced high-precision systems in the world, and we really address all of those.

And then the supply side is you go put a miner on your, uh, I don't know if you call miners, but you, you put a machine, I'm assuming, on your roof or outside your house or something like that?

Yes, we do. And we, uh, we do call them miners. We call them satellite miners. We also call them space weather stations. Uh, you need to get them up on your roof with a clear sky view, um, and a stable internet and power connection, and, and you're off and running mining Geodnet. We encourage people to look for empty hexes because that's where you have an opportunity to earn what we call location NFT. So if you're a first mover and get your station set up well so it's providing reliable high accuracy data, you can earn what are location NFTs, which then gives you kind of a first mover right in that hex so that you're guaranteed to have available to you the highest rewards rate for the long term of the project. And that's something that we think is important to create a stable long-term infrastructure is to make sure that it's not a sort of a kind of a gold rush to try to get in with anything, any installation. What we really want is a stable, strong network because that's what provides the exponential value.

Yeah.

Chris, can you walk me through maybe the CoinFund investment thesis on this?

Yeah, I think any time that you're looking to invest and again, just, you know, we are investors, just want to make sure there's— people do their own research, but you want to look at TAM, founders. And frankly, the one thing I like is utility. Look, Mike is one of the premier experts in this technology in the world. And this project is so fascinating because you're able to leverage what makes Web3 special by able to create the largest RTK network in the world, leveraging the incentivization of tokens, right, to deliver real utility. So I would love to take a minute to talk about some utility. And I'm going to start with like a very simple example with precision agriculture. Okay. Today, 27% of farmers in the United States use precision agriculture, and it's the largest of the large, right? Why? Because of all those things that Mike spoke about. You have to hire a big centralized company to put up a big tower. It's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars. You're going to have to subscribe for every single vehicle. that you use thousands of dollars per year. And so why would you do it? Because for scale, if you use this technology, you're going to have better yields. It's very simple. In the context of climate change, you're going to have better yields. It's very important. But only 27% of farmers use it because it's so expensive. You got to be big to be able to afford it. Mike comes along, and now you're able to subscribe for a very fraction of the cost. It unlocks that— this utility And by the way, farming is just a very small vertical, but it's very easy to understand. By the way, like how many times throughout our career, oh, I got this great technology, what can you do with it? Well, this is real. And when I go down to DC and I talk to policymakers and be like, you know what, we're actually using crypto to help farmers, like the light bulb that goes on is incredible, right? Because this is real utility using decentralization to help a demographic that's been locked out of certain advances in technology, humongous application. And that's only one small vertical. I talked about some of the other verticals. Mike mentioned construction. We talked about gaming, automated vehicles. And so you have an, you have an industry with a growing TAM. You have real, real utility and you have DePIN. And, you know, my sense is that DePIN really hasn't had its moment yet in crypto. We're investors in a few projects across the board. Ones like Deemo, uh, which uses, which uses cars, um, to, to, and, and their data. But, um, you know, you, you have an incredible founder with, with a growing TAM and like real, real utility. Um, that, that's something that I think is really interesting.

Yeah, I mean, um, just to corroborate with that, um, the reason why I like GeoNet so much, and again, none of this is legal, financial, or any advice, is To me, it was very perplexing where when I first spoke with Mike, it felt to me that Gionna was getting way more traction outside the industry, outside of crypto, than within crypto. And I think there's reasons for that. But, you know, Mike, maybe you can talk about like when you go to these industry conferences, the reception that you get from, you know, people in different verticals, particularly agriculture or some other verticals. even, you know, drivers that are using GeoNet to improve the location and the tracking. And to me, that's, that's really encouraging. Um, I, I think Deepin really makes crypto relatable. Like, anyone can understand if you get a better data plan, if you get— if you're earning more money as an Uber driver because you have more precision, or, you know, you're playing Pokémon Go and all of a sudden you have more reliability, or in agriculture. But to me, that's really interesting. Like, most of the time we see the inverse, where like crypto companies there's a lot of hype, um, but there's not a lot of real— we talk about this word utility, uh, and it's sort of something that we punt, but this is actually real and you're getting a lot of reception in these conferences. So maybe you can talk about that, Mike, because I found that to be really interesting.

Yeah, so I mean, the, the project started by introducing the idea at the Institute of Navigation GNSS+ conference, and this is an academic and government-oriented conference with the top minds in the theory and infrastructure of satellite navigation, sort of what upgrades should be done to the satellites, how, how to do better algorithms for precise location and so forth. And it's pretty, you know, it's a pretty intense audience. We presented the white paper there, and I was pretty concerned that with the crypto angle and the blockchain angle that people wouldn't receive, receive it well. And we won best paper, and from there the project started. And we've always had as much interest on the Web2 side and what we're doing as in the Web3, if not more. It's because it really, first of all, I mean, satellite navigation is decentralized in a sort of unique way today already. We, your phone is receiving data from Russian satellites. You may not know that, but you're receiving data from Russian satellites, European satellites, and many, many phones are, you're also receiving from Chinese satellites. So you're already leveraging a decentralized network when you do location. So I think there's an inherent understanding that this creates robustness and reliability in the field that we're in. And then the ability to scale up a solution to this problem that's been around for so long that hasn't been really solved in a global or mass market way, I think, is an extremely attractive value proposition. So we started out from a conference that is very focused on the infrastructure. Our white paper was published in the Journal of Navigation, which is a peer-reviewed journal as well, and top journal in all of navigation. And started to go to the commercial side shows and also receive very good reception there. And that's where we found our customers, frankly, is at these events. You know, these are places that people go to find the latest solutions and technology in the field of positioning, mapping, navigation, autonomy, drones, equipment. We go to those shows, show our solution, and people, you know, really don't think about the blockchain angle at all. It's like, well, I can get a station cost-effectively set up if I need to get coverage in an area, or I can just buy the service if the coverage is there. It's very attractive. I mean, these are day-to-day problems that people have in their businesses. The United States, it's interesting, the infrastructure in the United States for high-precision navigation is pretty poor, and GeoNet is really leading the way to get a dense, fully modernized network in the United States very quickly. And so I go to conferences and international conferences and people who are trying to export equipment, they're always like, well, I can't, you know, I can't get anything in the United States. It's the worst. It's the most expensive with the least coverage. And here we are, we're approaching full coverage in the United States. And we're basically there in the EU. We have pretty much end-to-end coverage of the continent. And we're starting to turn our focus more and more to the developing world where there is no infrastructure at all today. One of the things I love about the developing world is that we build the infrastructure out in the developing world as a commercial reliable solution, and we're the first guys to do it. We probably will be the only solution ever created in that environment because the cost of our network, the density of the stations, it just doesn't lend itself to other people coming in after us. What it lends itself to is people leveraging what we've built. Just like you wouldn't think about creating a new internet today, right? Leverage the internet that's there. We're building that internet for high accuracy navigation.

I want to double-click something that you said, Chris, which I think is really important. This idea that like crypto enables a new type of business model, the, the same with it. I, I liken it to like software as a service as opposed to like companies themselves having to invest all this CapEx. They could just rent software on a per-seat basis back in like 2001, and then that detonated a huge movement. And I sort of see the same in Deepin, right? And Mike, maybe if we could just go through a series of questions, right? Like, because there are public companies, there are Web2 companies that have tried to scale out in a traditional way and they've raised— I mean, you know this better, but like how many? There's like 2 or 3 and they've raised from private equity like hundreds of millions of dollars, right?

Yes, they've raised collectively probably $250 million to tackle the same problem, to build mass market, high precision infrastructure. They've looked at the traditional companies and said they're moving too slow, they're not adding enough coverage. Let's, let's go to the private equity and venture capital markets and raise it. They have a fraction of the number of stations deployed that we do. So it's been a tough go and it hasn't been enabling. And I think that the ecosystem approach as well, where everybody can participate, you know, our token is followed very closely by a lot of folks in the Web2 infrastructure side. I think they're looking at it as an opportunity for them to participate and the upside of what's being built as well, because it's a solution that really can transform the whole industry. It can really leverage, you know, physical infrastructure on the ground. It's a little bit of a build it and they will come type of thing. When you, when you put in new roads, new airports, that all of a sudden attracts new markets and new, a new business. And, and that's what GeoNet is. That's what the industry sees that we're doing. We're building this new infrastructure And that's going to lead to new markets and growth of existing markets that wasn't there before.

And just to emphasize the idea, as opposed to you having to front the CapEx, you're having all these do-it-yourself enthusiasts all over the world say, hey, look, I can be the first to set it up, or I can participate in this network. I'm going to put that money up front myself, get an NFT. And there's a very clear token economics here that they perhaps see in the same way that Bitcoin miners like are investing in ASICs to like, you know, mine Bitcoin. No different here, right? But like, give us a sense of scale. Like how many, how many, like when you say you've mapped out a lot of the EU, a lot of the US, what is that? Do you have a sense of like the cost for all like collectively these participants? And like what would it take for you to like cover the entire world?

Well, we're looking to get to, uh, over 10,000 by the end of the year, um, as a goal. And, uh, you know, 20,000 will provide, I think, very robust coverage for the developing world and a lot of the, uh, I mean, for the developed world and for a reasonable part of the developing world. And then the long-term goal is to get to 100,000 stations. So there is, um, you know, longer term, if you look at the project, there is a bit of a scarcity play. The, the The thing about geospatial is it's inherently decentralized, and that's what makes it so difficult for a centralized approach to work. It is inherently decentralized. You physically have to get these things into all these different locations. But at the same time, the actual total CapEx at some point sort of levels off that needs to be spent. Now, doing it with Deepin is two orders of magnitude more efficient capital-wise than doing it the centralized way, not only just in terms of leveraging DIY, but also just fundamentally more capital efficient. It is more capital efficient to reuse your home and to reuse your home internet and to reuse the power at your home than to put that in somewhere else. Now, if you're doing a cell tower, you don't really have a choice. You need to get it up really high. It needs to have super high bandwidth backbone. That's just not the case for the problem that we're trying to solve. So we're able to really elegantly reuse the physical decentralization that the actual— the surface of the earth is a scarce resource. In our protocol. It's a very elegant, you know, tokenomic usage of that that provides real utility. People have talked about these land NFTs and things like that, but a lot of that's been sort of in a gaming context. This is actually using that same scarce resource, the surface of the earth, as a real physical constraint that's actually needed in a real-world utility.

Hey Mike, if I could just chime in, I think to Santi's question, you're also seeing some companies popping up This is not just a fully retail distribution, right? Maybe you want to talk about that.

Yeah, so certainly in drones and in agriculture, both have been leading the way in having their user bases deploy nodes. So we have distributors and dealers of equipment for farming who have worked with their user bases to add nodes to the network in rural America and also in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe. Gone very quickly now, now starting also in Spain and, um, uh, Germany and, and more Central Europe as well in the ag application. So you have— we have seen that crossover work very nicely. Um, those are, you know, companies that are dealing in equipment, um, and dealing in services for, you know, drones and farming. It's been a very quick adoption of our, of our technology.

Mike, it's a very similar pitch to Helium, I think, in the early days of like, look, it costs a lot of money to create the infrastructure. Let's have the people do it, run these IoT networks. And there were good things from Helium, but there were also things that they probably got wrong. So I'd be curious when you think about some of the earlier DePIN projects that came before you, like what takeaways do you have both on the, hey, they did this right, let's, let's replicate that. And then, hey, look, they probably got this wrong. Let's do it differently.

Well, I think there's two angles to that. One is on the Web2 side and one's on the Web3 side. So let me just take the Web2 side first. I think LoRa is a super cool technology. You know, the IoT networking standard that Helium is helping standardize and helping promote, I like a lot, but it doesn't have as strong a clear marketplace as high-precision location does. A lot of people who use LoRa networks, they do it for an internal purpose. So it's like for a hospital, it's not a network where you necessarily, there are some applications where you wanna roam, but there are a lot of applications that are sort of proprietary or localized to a specific building or a location. So the utility of a broad-scale wide area network isn't as strong and the standard isn't as strong. There are many sort of, there's different classes of devices on LoRa networks. There's not as strong a history of standardization as there is in GNSS. That strong standardization leads to quick adoption. The industry has put these standards in place, so it's very easy and trivial for a customer who's using equipment today that supports RTK to switch to GeoNet, and that's helping adoption. And I think the utility of the solution and the cost that people have been paying kind of demonstrate the value that's there. So that's the Web2 side that I think is really different between, say, high-precision location and LoRa. But I do think LoRa will have its day, and I do think it's very important and has a lot of utility. So I, I do think that it's just going to take more time for those applications to build out. The second piece is the Web3 side, and I think definitely there we've learned from the tokenomics. We are really incentivizing building a high-quality network. And one of the things that struck me is I participated in Helium in the early days, and I think it's really brought a lot of the ideas that are in Deepin to bear for sure. But the sort of things that were being sold for miner, for infrastructure in Helium, a lot of them didn't really incentivize putting up quality coverage. And this was both in their tokenomics, but also in the sort of hardware kits that were being sold. You'd get a small whip antenna, you'd set up on your desk. You weren't really providing really high quality coverage. They had a lot of cheating, uh, in the protocol in the early days. They've worked to address that. So there was a lot of tokens that were emitted that didn't create a high-quality network. And in the end of the day, that's the high-quality, reliable network infrastructure is really what will bring in the revenue. And by putting out a lot of tokens too quickly without providing that actual real-world coverage to enable people to use the network, I think is is kind of the core Web3 mistake that was made.

Mike, do you have— what does the revenue look like today?

So we're right around a million in ARR, um, and we have been growing through adding new, um, customers who are all kind of going through a roll— rollout phase. So I think one of the exciting things is we've exceeded the number of, of people sort of signing enterprise deals to use the network than we thought we could possibly do. It's really, really going quickly. And each of those things then has a sort of a rollout and scale out that looks very encouraging over the next couple of years. Of course, you know, market conditions can change. And certainly one of the things I think in Deepin that, you know, Web2 is still looking at is this a long-term solution. It's very attractive to the Web2 side of our marketplace. The economics are very attractive, the scalability. I think it needs to go through a little bit like BTC. Bitcoin, no longer do people question that it's a fundamental part of our financial infrastructure. I think from Ethereum, Solana, people really see the value that smart contracts have provided. Nobody questions that smart contracts is going to be a fundamental part of a lot of financial solutions out there. I think Deepin hasn't quite crossed that barrier. We hope we're one of the projects that can show the way that this is a long-term solution to core infrastructure problems, that this is a real way to build and scale infrastructure. And I think that that's— of all the things out there that would slow revenue down, it's doubts and concerns that DePIN may not be the right long-term solution. And so we're pushing very hard on the Web2 side and on the protocol side to make sure that we deliver truly reliable, high-quality infrastructure and demonstrate that over and over again. When we have problems, fix them, make sure that that delivers, and then the revenue will scale up dramatically.

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Well, I think you would have Tesla, Amazon, um, Google. Those would be, you know, 3 of the, the big 3 that, um, are very much active in end-user applications that absolutely leverage high-precision location day in and day out. And I think those would be dream clients.

Like, the one thing I've seen with Deepin founders is there's probably the least focus. I actually messaged Santi earlier in this podcast. I said it's really refreshing to see a founder with this kind of background. It's like a totally new type of background coming into crypto, new, new type of founder, new experience. I don't know what you studied in college, but clearly seems like some sort of mechanical engineering or, like, I don't know, electric, something like electrical engineering, computer science.

Yes, engineer for sure. Yeah.

So it's just, it's great to have someone with your background. The thing I've seen with a lot of DePIN founders is there's a lack of, for better, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, focus on like building community and on like number go up technology with token. Candidly, like, how do you think about some of the more crypto-native sides of building a deep-end company?

Well, I think we're about to unlock a lot of things that will help drive that. I agree it is a weakness in the deep-end community. Not all projects, it's not a weakness. I think there's some out there that are doing really great things on community. We're looking and looking to learn from them. I think it's super important. I think that, you know, it's something that is— with the— there's a lot of things to focus on in parallel. And I think one of the biggest challenges is like, you've got a community, you've got tokenomics, you've got working with your Web2 customers, you've got building up distribution channels and proving out the reliability of everything. So a lot of, a lot of things to juggle. Community is one I would agree, and Deepin has often fallen down. And I think that it's paramount to focus on it. I think community provides a lot of resiliency and strength, and, and through, you know, through and through. So we're focused on it, we're trying to improve. I think, uh, it's an area of improvement for GeoNet for sure.

Yeah. How do you solve the thing that happened to Helium, which is people come in, they, they run up, they, they spin up the miners, they can actually make a lot of money if they're first into an area, but then as that area gets more populated they, the, the dollars decrease, right?

Yeah, I think that's a, a huge part of our tokenomics. So our tokenomics, um, you know, first and foremost, our tokenomics emphasize utility. Um, that utility is realized through a burning mechanism. That burning mechanism burns, uh, tokens completely. It sends them to the dead address. So our total circulating supply is decreasing. I think the second, uh, element is scarcity. So, you know, we don't need millions and millions of nodes out there, and we have tokenomics that, you know, reward, uh, first mover advantages like the location NFT. So the scarcity encourages people to get installations in early and get them done correctly, but then prevents too much token emissions. And then finally, we have halving. So we have an annual halving, it's coming up on June 30th, um, so that as the network grows, uh, again, we're controlling that emissions to be something that long-term is scarce. And I think that's one of the core elements that you do have to go a little bit slower in the beginning so that you can sustain it over the long-term. And I think the community is something that kind of goes hand in hand with it's harder to get the numbers to be huge on the community side when you're when you're dealing with something where you do need to roll it out in a way that preserves the scarcity of the token. Yeah.

Do any of the Web2 customers that you guys go to not want to work with you because of your token?

No, I wouldn't say that. I would say that most of them are very curious and interested. Some have already jumped in on the token, but for the most part, it's a curiosity and it is something that they see as providing economic advantage and they see it as, as, as all the things that Santi described. They see it as a new way of, you know, building infrastructure that makes a lot of sense. So I wouldn't say that anyone's turned it down. There's certainly— they, you know, will raise questions about, you know, how does it work? Are you worried about regulatory issues? These types of things that I think broadly deepen in the whole crypto industry. It would be wonderful if more of these solutions, you know, come out. And certainly thank all the work that CoinFund and all the other groups that are working to help clarify and improve those things are doing. It's tremendous support from the industry in this regard.

Yeah. Chris, what about— I mean, you spend a lot of time in DC. Do you think something like this— like, let's say you took this to your like military friends and you're like, you know, you've got the location data is 3 feet. Now I can go to 3 inches or 3 centimeters or whatever it is. And they're like, that's amazing. And you're like, yeah, but it's a crypto company and it's got a token. Just a heads up. Is that— is crypto still so badly viewed that that would be a deterrent?

You know, I speak to my Marine buddies all the time. Most of them are pilots. They give me a hard time, obviously, like all of us about certain things like for some reason they really don't like NFTs, but that's not here nor there. But when I started talking to them about GeoNet, like the light bulb went on and literally I've asked them questions. Mike's had incredible responses. You know, we're going through some real challenges globally right now on ensuring that you have redundancy and accuracy. And a lot of these guys are pilots, they fly commercial airlines, et cetera. And they look at technology like this and they're like, I need this. I need the redundancy, I need the accuracy. Um, maybe Mike can talk about, you know, some of the ways that this can like help various industries, particularly in a world where there's a lot more spoofing in, in different war zones, etc. You're more of an expert than me, Mike. But like this project, um, and maybe it's because of our military bias about how important accuracy is, but they, they've really, um, enjoyed it. Last thing I'll tell you is that like I go to DC all the time and I keep talking about farmers. Why? Because the CFTC is, um, overseen by the Ag Committee, right? And when I go to them and I say, hey guys, I have something that's going to help your farmers, the, the reception that you get is, is profound because everyone wants to help farmers. And I can't tell you how many farmers I spoke to, because I did— that's what you do when you do due diligence— and they're like, wait, you're telling me that my costs are going to go down? Um, no one ever tells me this. They keep upselling me and it's awful. Like, I want to— I need to learn about this. So like policy-wise, I think there's so much to unlock. But maybe, Mike, you can unpack, you know, some of the things. You know, last thing I'll say is we had this huge solar storm, right? And guess what? It happened at the peak of planting season. And I think, you know, GeoNet performed quite well. So maybe you can talk about some of the redundancy, Mike.

Yeah, I think that to make satellite navigation work, it's very tricky. It's a very complex system that involves a lot of physics and math and so forth. And, uh, the, the need to get more redundant data, the need to get data from the ground, this terrestrial data that we, that our network collects, is just paramount to reliable operation. And it's also paramount to detecting problems. And one of the things that Chris's pilot friends are talking about, and it's been in the news a ton, is there's been a really increased use of, uh, jamming and spoofing in, in really Northern Europe as well as in the Middle East. And it is presenting such a, such a problem to such a degree for commercial aircraft that certain routes have been canceled. So actually certain routes that don't have alternative approach mechanisms besides a GPS approach have actually just been outright canceled for a period of time until things kind of settle down. Our infrastructure— this isn't the core problem that we've decided to go after as the first market. I think every business needs to think about like what's the sort of entry strategy. But you can definitely use GeoNet to detect jamming and spoofing. And these are data products that we are in talks with people about potentially commercializing to help augment, you know, augment aircraft applications as well as naval applications against jamming and spoofing. It's quite dangerous. You can potentially, you know, bring up a plane into airspace you don't want it to be in. In an extreme case, you know, if there's no alternative for an approach and you have weather, and the GPS system isn't working well, you can miss your approach and crash the aircraft. So it is something that is, is a, is a very real case where this kind of infrastructure can provide tremendous value.

Hmm. What about the use case of— I saw this, I just watched a CES big expo show, like takeaways video on YouTube, and there are a lot of like in-home robots And, uh, I would say like external to the home robots, but like on your lawn, like lawn mowers and— yeah, inside the home.

On this, on Twitter, so there, there's a couple manufacturers were already selected GeoNet to use. Um, they'll be in this, in this category next week. Yes, one announced next week, another one announced a couple weeks after that. Um, they'll be both, you know, professional services that are mowing, like landscapers Fleets mowing with Geonet, are already mowing with Geonet, I should say. That one's already live. There'll be a consumer robot launched with Geonet here within the next month or two. Just been ramping, they've been ramping up production, doing final testing. I posted a picture on our Twitter yesterday from the factory. So yeah, that's a huge market. It's one I'm very, very excited about. I think Deepin has a big role to play there in general. But yeah, these robots, they're green. They keep your lawn trimmed every day. I have 4 of them here at my property in Los Altos Hills. We've been testing as well. I've got a couple down in Texas. They're super nice. I mean, you know, they make your yard look really great. It's like getting a haircut every day. And yeah, it's a simple thing, but there's an ROI, right? I mean, you pay money to landscapers or ROI for landscaping firms to use these as a tool. To enhance their business. There's an ROI for people who have a simple lawn to just use them as a standalone solution, just have it mow your yard every day. And there'll be more of those delivery robots. There's obviously drone delivery. It's a great technology. I'm super excited about small robots. I think this is something that will have huge growth over the coming years.

It's hard to land a robot if you're only accurate to 3 meters, right?

Yeah, so drone in a box, drone delivery— these are fundamental users of RTK. If you look on videos, you'll all see that this is just drones in general. Even just the flyability of a drone improves tremendously with RTK. You have wind, right? So you're trying to take good photographs, you're trying to— you're trying to keep a drone on target. If you don't have RTK, it can only use GPS to sort of have it in a general way, and if it doesn't have much to look at, it can't use the camera. I mean, this, uh, cameras are very useful as a, as a, as also as a navigation source. And there's a lot of, like, the robots typically integrate GPS with cameras. So they're both solutions are important. But if you're, if you don't have a lot of what they call geometry, the cameras don't work. They can't differentiate relatively where they're at. So if you want to take great pictures with a drone in the wind, um, RTK is a great solution. It'll put your, it'll keep your drone within a, you know, a golf ball-sized three-dimensional pattern. And that makes it much easier to fly, makes it much easier to collect imagery. So from the most simple basic application of flying a drone, just making it more flyable, all the way to doing drone survey, we're gonna build a 3D model of the world and you're gonna guarantee to your end client, the contractor, that you have produced an accurate 3D model to inch-level accuracy so they can buy materials and plan construction, that whole space, All of it can use RTK.

Hmm. That's really cool. Yeah, I have two friends who work in the self-driving space at two of the bigger, like, self-driving car companies. And yeah, I mean, they've just told me about the, like, kind of limiting behaviors of cameras here. So it's— I don't know, I can't help but think about that here.

Fusion is really the solution to this. So good, high-quality sensor fusion between cameras, LiDAR, RTK. We have a— yeah, we webinar sponsored by GPS World and Geodnet next week, June 27th, and it'll talk about this exact topic, the fusion of high-precision inertial navigation, GPS, and LiDAR together for autonomous applications.

Uh, several years out, Mike, is Geodnet a public company or a private company where the value has accrued to the token?

Well, it's definitely everything that we're doing is to accrue value to the token. We are focused on full decentralization. So I hope by mid-2025, if not sooner, the protocol is entirely decentralized. This is something that's unique for GeoNet in the deep in space. The centralized element is not necessary. The, the way that the data is, is relayed to customers, the way it's validated and verified, all this can be done in a fully decentralized fashion. And that's 100% the goal of the project is to have a completely permissionless decentralized protocol for producing verified, high-accurate locations.

Yeah. Chris, on the Deepin side at CoinFund, what do you think is the catalyst that's going to make Deepin— like, trying to think of a fancy way for saying Deepin tokens go up in the same way that, like, you know, some of the AI coins, whether it's like Render or Kosh, like the thing that probably like moved the needle there, the catalyst was AI boom, ChatGPT-3, then 4, then NVIDIA stock goes up, and then that something like that kind of moves some of these AI coins. Like, do you have a sense of what that's going to be for, for Deepin?

You know, I don't know if you need a massive pump, you know, in the near term. Um, you know, I think with many of these projects, they're delivering real utility and value, and, and maybe you're not going to see an immediate pump, and, you know, you're going to have a season. Maybe you will. But I think we look at long-term, like long-term utility, long-term value. And to the extent that you're doing something unique, you're driving users to your platform, people that need that data, that's gonna create a flywheel, a community will build. And I think we're always focused over the long term. So what do you look at? You look at number of devices that are sold, how quickly is that accelerating? How quickly is coverage accelerating? Where is demand? Demand is going to drive value. And if they're providing real utility, that's where you're going to see the long-term value accrual. So I don't, you know, are we going to have a deep-end season? Probably at one of these points we're going to cycle around and say, okay, we're done with the mother token. Let's move over to the deep. Let's move over to deep-end, guys. But that's not really what we're focusing on. We're talking, we're really focusing on long-term value creation.

Maybe just to play devil's advocate, I mean, obviously from my perspective, much like you, Chris, I share the same view. But what could derail the entire project? Like, what are some of the risks that you foresee? I mean, a lot of times in crypto, you know, people focus so much on price and that oftentimes, you know, can be distracting. But I'm curious, Mike or Chris, what do you guys see as major risks for the protocol, for the continued growth of the network? I mean, I'm just kind of curious from your perspective.

Well, my perspective is that we've kind of passed through a lot of core risks that we feel we've put behind us, and so that's exciting. But certainly, broad political instability is certainly a danger. It is, you know, which would influence potentially the regulatory climate in ways for crypto and for DePIN and infrastructure in general. We're about connecting things together, and to the extent that the governments of the world decide to tear things apart, um, and, uh, you know, bomb each other into oblivion, that's just bad for everybody. That's at the top of my list, actually, of, you know, risks. It's just broad geopolitical instability. Seems, uh, it's great for Bitcoin. I'm not sure it's as great for DePIN, uh, But it, it is, it is a worry that I have every day. Um, I think proving, continuing to, you know, solve this problem of making sure that we, we get to the hurdle where people see Deepin in the, the Web2 side, um, as a long-term solution is, is super important, that it gets that brand, uh, credibility that this is something like, you know, Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, that this is, this, these types of Technologies, I don't think anyone questions, are here to stay. I think that will be broadly helpful for all the deep-end projects when that occurs. And if it doesn't occur, it could be broadly harmful to the projects. So those are, those are the, the top two in terms of getting a deep-end, you know, summer to happen. I think that the projects go back to Janos, comment about community. I think that that's something that has really lacked in the DePIN industry and lack of community. I think we're as much to blame as any project. You know, it's just something we need to work on. Solana is organizing, you know, some events to help try to bring DePIN founders across the different chains together to talk about how to improve the efforts of community and learn from some of the other players in ecosystem on how they've done community. And we're certainly going to participate in that. I think it's an important element that's missing to, um, that, that has been there, um, that has been there. Think about, uh, TAO as a token, Render. I think these things have done a better job of creating that community sentiment than Deepin, uh, projects have done. And so that's something that I think, my opinion, that is the missing ingredient to, to really get the Web3 side catalyst going is that lack of community within the Deepin space.

Mike, what, what chain are you guys built on?

We're built on Polygon. Um, so, uh, we picked Polygon in 2022. It's been very reliable and stable solution for us. We are looking, um, we, uh, there is a bridge token on the IoTeX. We've participated a lot with IoTeX and I think they have a very good view of real-world applications and doing a lot of great things in DeepEnd. But we're open-minded to how to scale the solution going forward and do think that that community aspect is one that we have to, you know, listen to carefully to and ties into, I think, the chains that are supported with GeoNet.

Would you ever consider leaving Polygon to go to another chain simply because there's a different community, there's a community that's better somewhere else and that hasn't with zero regard to the technical side of things?

Well, I don't think you can ever go zero regard to the technical side of things because that's an important—

Well, let's say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But assuming that's not a factor, assuming all solutions are equal, yes, absolutely. I think go back to your comment earlier. I think that's one of the most important comments from that we've talked about is the community element isn't there in Deepin. In a strong way, um, like it is in some of the other elements of crypto. And this must be solved. Um, and so whatever that solution is, we're open-minded to. And we have to, you know, I, I talked to Santi, I talked to others, like, how do I solve it? I don't, I don't know all the answers. This is not my, you know, you— what, what everybody has things they're good at and not good at. It's not my personal expertise. Um, so we're, we're looking to add to our team. We're looking to broaden our horizons. But we think it's critical. We think it's critical deep-end projects work together a little bit more. Everybody kind of has their bespoke thing. There's some animosity even between some of the projects that I think is completely unnecessary and totally counterproductive. And to the extent that, you know, we haven't been perfect on community, I, you know, we want to improve on that. We see that as, as key to, uh, growing the, the whole deep-end space. We do it together.

Nice.

I mean, putting degens aside, Mike, Chris, to your point on the long term, even if you were to stay on Polygon, not move to Solana, if you continue to roll out and you get coverage that no other traditional company has ever gotten, and you continue to go to the industry conferences, and you let the crypto degens do their own thing and maybe punt shitcoins or whatever, I mean, at some point, you know, the market's sort of like a voting machine in the near term, weighing machine in the long term kind of thing. Like, you're providing real utility, like, as it relates to a risk on the end customer, like someone in agriculture, or doing a game that's relying heavily on location-based data, or an Uber driver, or a Hive Mapper, you know, person that is like farming the token. Like, Yeah, we talk about community, its importance a lot, but like, we also hear like community is really like mercenary, you know, most airdrops are dumped immediately. And so like, I don't know, like, do you— I guess maybe more of an open question, like, is community really that important? And what we think of community in crypto is very like short-term, and it's really not your customer anyways. Right. I mean, you're already getting usage. Most of the people that are using GeoNet, like, I don't know, you tell me, most of them are like not really crypto native, right? They're like doing their thing. And, you know, I appreciate like the token may not move or may not be appreciated because it's not in Solana or whatever, but like, I don't know, like I do wonder, like when you invest time in building community, I wouldn't say you don't have community, actually. I would say you're the project that perhaps has one of the most solid communities. It's just not in crypto per se. It's in your end customer, which, like, which one do you want to have?

Well, I think you need both. I think you run a risk if you, um, you know, fall off the, the, the Deepin falls off the narrative that you don't get that de facto solution where the industry sees Deepin as a long-term solution to infrastructure problems, which I think it is and has extremely strong economics. So there's a chance that you could do nothing with community and everything works great. It's not a risk I want to take. It's a— I think it's the best to do both and to have both sides be very strong. We're really a marriage of Web2 and Web3, and marriage involves, you know, compromise and working together. So the Web2 and the Web3 need to work together harmoniously to deliver, to unlock all this value. So we've heard back, you know, some of the things that Jarno pointed out. We try to drive up the number of people who are able to participate and from the Web3 side and the GeoNet ecosystem. And those are things that we're, we're, we're working on. Um, if it didn't happen, would it still work? It might, you know, it might very well. Uh, there's, there's very powerful unit economics in what we're doing. The fact that we've been able to get to the world's largest network, um, with the capitalization that, that's been put into the project to date, um, uh, from an investment point of view, is absolutely stunning. It's absolutely stunning. And so Uh, yeah, there's also awful lot of momentum on the Web2 side that can probably, um, carry the day, but I don't think that's the way to do it. I think, like I said, deep in will do much better and can be a much bigger pie if the community is there and if the projects work together in a way to unlock value for these things. And I think Web2 will come around. We're going to do a huge presence at the 2025 CES because we have a lot of different, you know, consumer electronics partners now both at the chipset level and at the device level who are working with GeoNet. We want to really frame that, you know, that, that whole thing and bring more and more Web2 people in and trying to do that in a way that not only highlights GeoNet but also highlights Deepin as a whole. We think that, that with CES, for example, I think is a perfect place to do that marriage between Web2 and Web3 for the Deepin community.

Mike, man, I think that's all I got. Chris, Mike, anything that we, that we missed here that you guys wanted to cover? Or Santi?

No, I mean, Chris, I, I didn't hear Chris like, uh, like risks or things that you're worried about. Maybe just not Juno, but just DePIN in general. Like, you know, like, yeah, I mean, Mike, you're sort of alluded to this, like if the price collapses to a point where like, no, like you sort of lose interest or it just becomes uneconomical for people. But I think like supply and demand sort of usually takes care of these things if it's an efficient market. But Chris, I don't know if you were to add something to like the risks that you guys are— or from your standpoint.

Yeah, like what's the benefit of this project? Again, I go back to utility and solving a real-world need, right? I think the biggest risk is if there's somebody who's able to figure it out cheaper and better and faster. Um, I don't I'd gotten to know Mike well enough that the guy lives on the cutting edge of academia. He knows every single innovation that, that, that's being done, um, within universities. Um, you know, he talked about some of the advancements he's looking at with LEOs. So, um, I feel pretty good about this founder. Um, but, but to me it's like, okay, what happens if somebody builds a better mousetrap in time? Um, but gosh, um, incredible head start. Look what they've accomplished. Largest RTK. Network in the world in a very short period of time, like really leveraging the power of DePIN, right? Like, like using those tokens to incentivize behaviors that would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars and effectively been impossible without this technology. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about.

Mike, Chris, appreciate the time, guys.

Thank you. Thank you, guys.

Thanks for having us on.