Althea community call - road to Mainnet

Recorded: March 29, 2024 Duration: 0:25:28

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hey hey all of that some folks uh triple in trickle in here as we just get started
um behind the mic here uh behind Althea here is uh Debra Sumpier and myself who is the CEO of Hawk
Networks. Hawk Networks has incubated the Althea platform and project and is supporting the road
to Althea mainnet for the Althea L1 blockchain a settlement layer for machines and dpin um and
I have with me here uh John uh from the Hawk Networks team as well who is supporting as
uh head of marketing if you want to say a quick hi while we're letting folks jump in hey everyone
yeah this is John uh supporting the marketing initiatives here at Althea um very excited to
be here and uh yeah looking forward to this conversation we'll let uh we'll let folks kind
of trickle in a little bit here and I'm sure what was that sounds good um while we're letting
folks trickle in please feel free to ask questions in the discord and we'll try to get them uh
with them here if you want to just jump in and chat a little bit this is an open space
so feel free to just raise a hand ask a question jump in with some thoughts um and uh you know
it's it's it's participatory so you certainly want um everybody's uh sort of collective
uh conversation here um we also uh will record this so if you don't get a chance to listen to
all of it we'll have that available and we do these every week now at Friday at noon pacific
9 a.m eastern time um and I am all joining y'all here from Atlanta today where we are building out
some of the the world's first liquid infrastructure projects which is really exciting um and uh liquid
infrastructure for those that might be joining us for the first time is a tokenized telecom asset
so um we have kind of apartment buildings uh that we we build in a bunch of different
states how networks does um uh so for example one of the ones we're doing they just have copper
internet slow um so we're bringing fiber to the unit via the althea platform and then we're
actually going to tokenize that asset as an nft and one that lets us uh do is actually fund um
people can buy sort of shares uh or you can buy parts of it fractionalize of of the um of that
asset itself of that fiber optic and all the electronics and then have programmatic kind of
streamed revenue um for participating in funding the build so that's pretty cool i'm here uh kind of
helping those projects get off the ground and get started so over the next couple of months you'll
see some of those actually come online and onto the new althea one layer one blockchain um
so i'm going to show a little bit about what we've been doing this last week since we last
talked all together and um where we're at in terms of the road map to main net and um
and then john can share a little bit about what we've been doing on the marketing and community side as
well i think we can go ahead and get started seems like we got a few folks here
absolutely good everybody hear me okay
oh yeah loud and clear okay okay you're a little quiet on the quiet side there uh john so go feel
free to be a little louder at least for me anyway all right so since we last spoke over the last
week we've been uh kicking the tires on the test net so a lot of a lot of folks that are
you know kind of participating in that uh you know logistically um we have uh not here today but
you may have heard from the chander station team which is um an independent validator who has been
building out the althea front end um and uh but we've been kicking the tires around on that
or as many maybe no or don't know it's a hybrid evm chain so working with the althea front
end is all going to be medic metamask and ethereum based uh tools and wallets so getting
that process smoothed out before we you know launch some sort uh some like the main net
where other people can come and join is a big part of what we've been doing right now so there's a lot
of kicking tires testing things getting things working um but after that process we're going
to be revealing kind of a new um kind of a prettier front end in design that's coming
next week or so and then we can we can launch uh a main net and it's and it's again a lot of
the reason why you know all of these things are happening now is not simply because you know it's
exciting time in general but these liquid infrastructure projects need to come on chain
so that althea can scale so althea's been building that althea meaning the platform
has been growing throughout the u.s four different states uh excuse me four different countries
um but sort of meeting the capital requirements of telecom bills or unlocking existing telecom
assets in fact there's 2.5 trillion in booked assets in the top 30 telecom companies in
the world right now um and at the same time all of those assets really aren't working for
those telco companies access to capital is is exceedingly difficult um as inflation rates
are really high in the u.s you can get uh investors are retreating to um relatively safe
bets uh where the the interest rate is quite high um so it sort of leaves availability of capital
um at uh restricted so well look what infrastructure does is really open up
those existing assets on the telecoms book that 2.5 trillion just sort of sitting there
so this can be leveraged uh for additional infrastructure builds um and uh so it's it's
pretty exciting so uh when the when the blockchain does launch uh it's launching into this environment
of a market that's very much waiting and and real physical fiber optic and radio builds that
are in process of getting built right now so pretty exciting stuff um john do you want to
fill us in uh on what's been happening on the community side or what we should look forward to
yeah absolutely so on the community side we will be we are looking to launch a uh
kind of like a little hackathon for marketing if you will um the althea thon uh where community
members will will kind of compete and write some content and and memes and infographics for for
althea and then uh get rewarded for doing so um so that should be coming up in the next uh
i would you know conservatively i would say maybe 10 days but uh hopefully a little sooner than that
um so please be on the lookout you know turn those notifications on tell your friends we're uh
we're trying to get uh to get the word out as fast as possible before uh before mainnet launches here
so if you are interested in or you're a meme generating uh person or you're really great at
contents or you have some skills uh on any of those you can definitely try your hands at the
althea what do you call it althea thon althea thon yeah althea thon uh try your hand on that
and we know there'll be some uh some i think monetary rewards right so for for participating
and yeah exactly and uh and supporting althea in the journey right it's gonna it's gonna take
all of us to really share this amazing word and uh so wherever your skill set lies you know
um we uh we are calling all community uh around the around the mainnet launch so um you know
go ahead creators you know they they always look at these hackathons and are afraid of
participating and can't participate because they lack sometimes the technical skills so
we're trying to trying to grow the community from technical to to content forward as well
so yeah it's a big tent right i mean i i think what's so exciting about althea and of course we've
been building for years is that it is disruptive at its heart right it disrupts the sort of legacy
brittle systems you know we saw what just happened um in africa not too long ago where
the submarine cables had you know failed or whatever and you know most of africa was dark
before that was australia with the major adage there you know a good part of that continent um
you know and then even you know around that same time you have those large-scale at&t outages in
the u.s there's obviously something very fundamentally broken and brittle about existing
systems um and you know althea is fundamentally system design that really is coming to address
a lot of the that brittleness that exists in legacy uh technology um or legacy systems but it's
not a you know uh just a technology its solution it's a it's it's a very human forward how do humans
interact with technology how does the system works so it is very much that everyone there's a big
tent it's really room for everyone to to join and and to participate and to to move forward that
that really bold vision that we have which is exciting um a couple of other things that we've
been working on in the hawk network side of the team so for those of us that are trying to join a
little later hawk networks is the the team that kind of incubated and supported the althea project
now of course it's launching a blockchain which means very different from something very different
than a company right a blockchain is an ecosystem with a bunch of different stakeholders and
participants and um you know we're excited about that inflection point that it's on but
hawk networks team itself definitely works a lot on the telecom side of how this actually goes to
market in um uh on that particular side of things and one of the kind of neat things that we've been
doing is uh building these kind of rapidly deployable uh five you know 4g 5g systems and
if we've talked about this in other calls before but one of the really cool um technology pieces
that hawk developed was um this uh what we call key lte but it's basically a 4g 5g core
that lives in the home router right so you can go to best buy and links this flash the althea
firmware because of course it's it's totally just software um and basically run a little 5g network
from your home or anywhere right um so this this really sort of flexible core has found a lot of
applications one of the things that uh has been happening over the last few weeks we've been doing
a few fairs um and you know really kind of providing that edge connectivity because it's
interesting you know fairs lose a lot of money because um they don't have secure communications
so everybody coming in and they're for the vendor so you're everyone's using wi-fi gets
really busy you know i mean all these folks know crypto conferences right so you go there the wi-fi
sucks um but if you're a vendor processing credit card transactions you're losing money
if you can't have good connectivity so uh bringing in the the like that key lte core and
kind of flexible solutions for a separated network it just runs the payment infrastructure
is what we've been doing and actually um talk networks team two will also have some events
coming up here soon including um uh one at the uh gm george mason and then the pentagon two
kind of showing off that um rapidly uh deployable and and kind of flexible core so that'll be
pretty cool way that we get a chance to show off the tech um
i'm gonna go ahead and approve you here king
oh i saw king you wanted to be a speaker that i was hoping that you had uh were
on the chat did you if you want to say something please go ahead and request again
oh he he left oh no all right well we're certainly uh i'm certainly happy to have
anybody jump up and chat and we can uh uh we'd love to have anybody participate
that wants to or if you've got questions in the chat um
i think we had one question on the on the twitter uh john maybe this is a good time to
to talk a little bit of you know to answer that or address that that person's question
absolutely i'll read it out for you uh if you want to take a crack at it so uh trdm asked
will the validators who participate in previous test nets but we're not included in the core
validators be able to receive a delegation on the main net so um so this is i think just a little
bit of basics around how a cosmos proof of stake system works um so uh you delegate to a validator
it's anyone can delegate if you hold althea tokens to whatever validator that you choose
um and the validator set is permissionless um so anyone can join uh the validator set the size of
the validator set is set by governance so the community decides how many people or how many
validators in the set but anyone can certainly join and participate with their validator in the
in the um althea ecosystem and we certainly encourage everyone to do so and in fact i think
one of the things hawk network team is going to work on is actually sort of building out
a combined router validator instance so to kind of further you know decentralize out the validator
set which is a big sort of um component of how we think about you know kind of the core these
these these theses of althea ethos ethos um in terms of like um the foundation delegation
and then certainly on the on the foundation to share uh it's it's it's thoughts around that and
i think we'll see that over the coming weeks as the um as the foundation sort of uh introduces
itself and to the community and talks about um you know ways to interact there on that side of
things um but yeah it's it's it's it's exciting because i think one of the core tenants of althea
is open and permissionless participation um and practicality and um you know both of those things
are you know i think empower people to join and participate whether that's in the the althea thon
or as a validator or by building network infrastructure there's you know there's room for everyone
i was the only question we had on twitter uh there's nothing on discord either but uh for those of you
in the call you know feel free to pop into the discord you know interact with our community ask
some questions uh we have some some good moderators here that are willing willing and able to answer
uh anything you have about althea one thing that we could probably share with y'all which we kind
of talked a little bit about last week is the d-pin docs um uh which is coming to the althea
blockchain um after you know after launch um one of the reasons why the althea blockchain is so
exciting is um one of the uh one of the kind of like needed things from an enterprise or deployment
of like physical infrastructure like like the d-pin tokens right is that enterprise needs to
interact in stable coins right it's very hard for them to interact or uh completely in a speculative
token environment so what um what's really exciting about althea is not only of course
do you have the um the physical machine to machine type payments and price for a routing protocol
will have a d-pin deck so um that will be a settlement layer for d-pin like tokens who want
to um you know sort of bring in will bridge in the the d-pin tokens and they can swap to usdc
um and then back out to fiat in a seamless way this way this really allows people the flexibility
to abstract away a lot of the complexities of crypto for simply just being able to use money
like money um and i think that's going to be a really compelling um use case it'll also encourage
you know folks that are already really excited about developing tokens on althea blockchain too
whether that's you know something like a lecture in the last hackathon um who uh lecture is like
an uber for ev chargers they're kind of based in the india market um and they would like also
that kind of you know they'll be in the evm environment but it allows all these d-pin tokens
to sort of swap between each other swap back out to liquidity too and i i think that's going to
be a really powerful catalyst um for new projects and existing projects to interact with each other
right to be interoperable yeah and it really uh really goes back to uh to the idea that althea is
trying to become the the d-pin settlement layer um and so having a dex on althea to be able to
swap between tokens will be uh kind of crucial for the whole ecosystem to thrive here well and
i think it's also super exciting because you know i mean i appreciate these folks that have been
you know building and and share this vision with us over these coming these last few years
as we've as the model's been really proven out you know and chance to really harden it in a real
world environment um but there wasn't necessarily a lot for folks to do from a from a uh from just
a purely like blockchain perspective or crypto perspective so this does also allow for you
know people to participate in a lot of those kind of d-fi primitives um while we bring those d-fi
primitives uh to uh you know rwa and to um to the kind of like real world utilities and infrastructure
that we're doing very exciting stuff
so next couple of weeks uh you know i think you know stay tuned will be the
althea thon coming out for y'all that participated um you know uh we'll we'll be kicking tires and
having a you know kind of a fresh face to the althea frontend to take a look at um some
contents that's coming out to um you know kind of around you know how the blockchain works with
you know some things about the d-pin ducts um and uh so those will be a lot of good
content out um as well to kind of deep dive into um and then these first liquid infrastructure
projects are going to be coming online as well pretty soon too so um definitely stay tuned
on the next kind of coming chapter
and if you are in the dc area on the next couple of weeks or in the phoenix
arizona area feel free to um wave at us we'd be happy to meet in person and there's a lot of folks
on the team that are going to be in those two areas in the next couple of weeks
or if anyone's going to token 2049 and Dubai um there's some althea folks over there too so
give us a holler we'd love to say hi get you some merch
great do we have any questions from the audience here uh if it doesn't anyone want to pop on stage
and uh and ask deborah any questions oh you know what would be fun to see i'd be fun to see how
many folks have been following us for like could we get like a thumbs up of folks that have been
following like althea for more than a year i know there's a few folks that have been are these all new
folks everyone new here y'all aren't listening all right well we should do it off the a pool and
discord so if y'all too shot oh there we go appreciate it there we go more than one year thank you
um nim kampoop yeah because you're okay nim nim has been an excellent project too that uh uh
has been utilizing the gravity bridge and um appreciate y'all there all right
art has also been there you'll be you'll be one year soon
yeah one year soon yeah uh all right that's exciting we should do a quick little um
we should do a discord uh like one two three three plus years been following the project um
we'd love to you know really recognize some of those folks that have uh been following since
the very beginning um you know the journey and to get to this really exciting inflection point
in althea's journey throw in the poem discord please yeah see you guys there
maybe we can even get some like some merch out or something like that to our long-time supporters
oh that's a great idea yeah we're trying to get we've got some new short designs and things
like that too folks so we're trying to get some up on shop.althea.net but or if you're interested
in like checking out um hacking on some of the hardware like checking out that key lte that we
talked about earlier that's that core that's embedded into the home router or deep diving
on any of that you can buy existing product at shop.althea.net or some of the kits um
and uh and test those stuff out you know um or or you can actually just go to our the
github althea firmware um and um if you're handy like that and flash it yourself as well
and we've got some folks i think it's in Ethiopia or Cameroon like i forget which better
um they're looking at building out their own system out there right now which is uh pretty
exciting too so you know it's it's country agnostic it's geographic agnostic it's a fiber optic coax
cable uh fixed wireless 4g 5g um a string into like one of the first things i did uh actually
back in like 2018 when we were you know building the first networks out in oregon um this is i built
a cantina right so uh if you don't know what a cantina is you take like a coffee can a metal
coffee can and you um basically solder in like a little resonator um and uh it's actually the
antenna or amplification part of the of the radio um i think i did one in like five gigahertz
so um there's a uh there's a set of like canned tennas that ran althea out there at one point in
time even on a coffee can that's amazing yeah um we we also have like you probably have seen this
if you've been around althea a while but we have these like uh raspberry pie demos and stuff like
that too you can even build the raspberry pie demo kit out too if you um which is pretty cool
it shows the price of wear routing protocol so um the price of wear routing protocol essentially lets
users choose their choice of cost or latency um on a basically a minute by minute basis or
second by second basis and then the packets route through the internet based on your choice and
then programmatically pay microtransactions to each of the you know nodes in the network
and that's how we remove a lot of the manual friction that creates that um
brittleness that we were speaking about earlier and um that's how we start to uh disaggregate
the existing you know kind of internet that's how we make it an open market um and allow for
um you know even resource constrained networks to utilize that same piece of hardware for multiple
you know providers and create a really open and programmatic market and that's
really at that's at the heart of the the disruption that althea brings it's pretty exciting
well that feels like a good note to leave it on um
if you'd like to stay in touch go to althea.net believe you can sign up for the uh newsletter
there so we'll be you know having some things coming down the pipeline um or stay in touch
with us on discord feel free to ask ask questions we'll have you answer them here next week um or
async on discord um as well awesome all right thanks everybody see you next week thanks everyone
appreciate you all