Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. We will get kicked off in just a moment. We
will be talking about dpin and dytech with carrier one. And we will get started in about 30 seconds.
We're waiting for the last few listeners to hop in before we get kicked off. Thanks so much
Hi, everyone. I'm Wayne Cunningham from the SWE Foundation and welcome to our X space. Today we're
discussing how SWE enables decentralized physical infrastructure, most notably how it enables mobile
phone services. We tend to think of mobile service providers as massive companies that often don't
answer to the needs of users. In some areas, they face minimal competition or even operate
monopolies. Can blockchain's promise of decentralization extend to mobile phone services? Joining me today
are Andrew Elithi, Nahid Mazad, and potentially Andrew Buchanan, although we've been having some
issues getting him on board, all from carrier one to talk about how their service works and what
the promises of SWE decentralization and mobile phone services. So let's get this started. Andrew
Elithi, do you want to give a brief intro about yourself? Yes, absolutely. So my name is Andrew
Elithi. I'm the CEO for carrier one. And my day to day operations has been looking at the radio
deployments as well as anything to do with operations. My background has been in computer
engineering. I've been in crypto space since 2010. And so notably, been doing a whole bunch of
stuff in the space. And this is one of the projects that I'm super excited to be part of.
Great, thank you, Andrew. And let's go to Nahid Mazad. Do you want to tell us a little about
yourself and your role at carrier one?
Yeah, hey, so I'm Nahid, CEO at carrier one, I have a background in computer science. I've been
involved in the crypto space since around 2016. Worked on a few token FT projects and got involved
with carrier one around 2022. Saw the big potential in DPN and DUI. So I've just been kind of full
force focus on carrier one. Some of my day to day roles, I kind of oversee a lot of the
crypto side and web three operations, upping along with tokenomics and design of the crypto
network. Recently seen a little bit overview of the marketing with our big spike in sweet people
and our partnership was sweet. But yeah, mainly just overview on the crypto side of things.
Great, thank you, Nahid. Let's get into the questions, get into it. So as a decentralized
mobile phone service, Andrew, Elithi, how does carrier one work?
Yeah, so carrier one is an orchestration platform that we see enabling worldwide telecom and anything
in telecom and wireless. So for us, it's overseen by our carrier DAO, which manages both KNS, which
is our carrier number system, and also our radio deployments. Now, the platform allows users to
receive an ECM, which is enabled phone plan. And they're able to utilize that to utilize our
network through radios that we call gatekeepers. Now, we offer a full circle solution regarding
connectivity to underserved communities, and also highly dense populated areas. And we are looking
at new ways for telephony. So the carrier number system, which is our flagship system,
is for signing numbers and providing SIM swap protection, and as well as enabling sweet
transactions based on phone numbers. Now, what we do is we believe in the moving forward of web3
by enabling web2 users to sign up with their phone numbers. And these phone numbers help create a
wallet and actually help utilize the wallet by allowing users to send and receive sweet and
also interact with our our entire network. And Andrew, can you go a little bit into
how carrier one connects with the global phone services, how I can call somebody from a carrier
one phone to a phone on any other network? Yeah, so from what we have currently so far is we
actually have a whole entire system in the back end. So the whole system that we have is
carrier grade telecom equipment. And this equipment allows users to make phone calls similar
to how they would both either on the KNS or using an ECM. So as long as they pop in an ECM
into their phone, or if they have the KNS number, they can utilize it through our app,
or through the through the ECM. And it will just dial as a regular phone call like you would have
with your current cell phone provider. Great, thanks. And I want to get into ECM a little bit
later in this conversation. But right now, I'd like to go to Nahid to give you a chance to talk and
Andrew mentioned something about connecting in underserved communities. So can you talk
to that a little bit about how carrier one can enable that? Yeah, so one of our biggest
primary focuses right off the bat has been giving connectivity or better connection to
these rural and indigenous communities, because we find them, they're really underserved with
traditional telco companies. So by partnering with a lot of these rural or indigenous communities,
they're willing to actually like, or more than happily to pay for the radio connection,
just as long as it means getting connectivity to their communities, where the telcos, it's not
profitable enough for them to go and install connectivity to these areas. So with our solution,
we've kind of like built a middle ground where we work with these telcos to provide us the
spectrum and the roaming agreements to be able to sell the hardware to these rural indigenous
communities and allow them to install it and either give themselves connectivity or better
connectivity, where the other case, they wouldn't have that or the telco companies are not going to
do it for a long time or just completely going to avoid them. And we do find it's a relatively
large market size to kind of be approaching. So one third of the world is currently like
unconnected or has very bad connectivity or no connectivity at all. So we found it was a really
good target market to start off with, but we do plan also to launch out into like more urban areas
and more dead zone areas or areas where other telco providers have just been lacking.
Thanks, Tahid. And can you comment a little bit about, are there any particular regions or areas
that you're looking at right now? Yeah, so we're actually in talks with a lot of the
native reserves and one of the areas where they're really interested in is Alaska actually.
So there's a few different native reserve tribes up in Alaska that actually own all the spectrum
up there and they're looking to kind of like work with a partner similar to us and get a solution
up and running. So we're looking to actually get a new POC up there with one of the bigger tribes.
Great, thank you. And back to you, Andrew, I'd like to get a better understanding of how SWE
plays a part in Carrier One's network. Yeah, so we're thrilled to be working with SWE
from a technical point of view. SWE is very modern. It has very fast transactions like
they almost settle in sub milliseconds, cheap gas fees, the use of the move language has
been very easy for us to develop some of our contracts. And there's a whole lot built into
it. So on the business side of things, I mean, we found common goals and growth and opportunities
right away with SWE. We both were looking into the same thing of bridging Web 2 to Web 3
because from a telecom side, most people don't care about Web 3 when it comes to their phones.
And quite frankly, we want to be able to enable those users to use cell phone plans
within Web 3 world. So some of that is like the seamless sign-on and identity solutions
that are offered from SWE. And then the other thing is Carrier One is working on enabling phone
number-based sign-ons. And with that phone number-based sign-on, you'll be able to generate a wallet,
be able to onboard to SWE and through Web 3 on our ecosystem. And you'll be able to map
a phone number to your actual wallet, and that will enable you to have almost similar
to the SWE name service. And so you'll be able to map that, use that towards getting transactions
or sending transactions using phone numbers. And that's a big major goal is bringing those Web 2
users. Now, working with SWE has been a pleasure for both of us, and we look forward to growing
the ecosystem with SWE. Thanks, Adrian. That's a great point about integrating with SWE and us.
I think there's a lot of potential there. One thing, could you comment a little bit about
when somebody sets up an account on Carrier One, like a user,
will that be an account based on the SWE network? Yes, that's correct. So we're going to have both
the option for custodial and the non-custodial portion of it. Now, with the SWE, the ZK login
allows us to have a person create a wallet using the phone number. So that makes it so
much more easier and so much more simpler, and everything can be based on the Web 3 address
that the user creates. And so that's why it's super important to work with the ZK login stuff.
Great. And Nahid, I want to go to you to talk about, you mentioned radios, and I suppose those
are nodes on the network. How does somebody become part of that? How does somebody set up a node on
Carrier One? Currently, we have in our current white paper foundational nodes, gatekeeper nodes,
operator nodes, but we're currently in the middle of updating the white paper and the tokenomics. So
that might have confused a few people on the foundational node side of things, because
now we're kind of like using SWE as our main platform since they're able to provide
everything we've needed that other chains haven't been able to. In order to become a
gatekeeper node, even though it's not fully released yet, we're kind of looking at like a
new system where we actually have like, deployers acting as similar to validators on SWE network.
And it'll be kind of like more of like a delegated proof of stake system. And in this way,
we found there's a lot of deployers out in North America and Canada that are willing to install
these carrier grade networks, similar to how they've been doing it on Helium. And they're
looking to actually do it in a more professional carrier grade manner. So that's actually
something that we're looking to kind of implement where it's not going to necessarily be just one
person installing a radio on their house where it's in the middle of nowhere, or they're not
able to maintain it. We're looking for like a little bit more of a professional deployment
manner where people are actually going to maintain it and properly deploy the radios.
So that would entitle you to become a deployer node on the network where you'll install these
radios and earn based on usage and tokens. And other people will actually be able to delegate to
these deployers and earn based on how they're deploying the radio and kind of like vote on
different areas where we need to provide connectivity and install regions if that makes sense.
Yeah, absolutely. And do you have specifications for somebody as far as what bandwidth they can offer
and power, an interruptible power supply for these radios?
Yeah, so it ranges from different types of radios and different types of specs on how high
the radio has to be or how much connectivity. We are planning on releasing all that information
very soon. So if people keep up with the project, they'll notice in the next few weeks,
hopefully we'll have all that updated on the website.
Great, thanks, Nahid. And I want to take it to the user side.
Andrew, can you talk about how someone gets phone service through CarrierOne?
Yeah, so with the phone service for CarrierOne, we're looking to be a mobile network enabler.
So what does that mean? It means that we work with deployers and existing mobile providers
to expand coverage. Now, this creates two different approaches to offering the cellular service.
So with your existing plan in Carrier, if CarrierOne has a bilateral roaming agreement in place,
which means we roam both ways, you could take advantage of CarrierOne's network without ever
having to do anything. So if you are currently with a different cell phone provider and you
want to make a call and you're in our area and your cell phone provider is not in an area,
they'll roam on our network. And so that makes it seamless. So at the end of the day,
we have some proof of concepts for leveraging this arrangement today,
where roaming of customers are connected to CarrierOne radios without having to do anything
special on their end. And we have about thousands of different users that are roaming currently
on our POCs today. And that number keeps growing as we get more roaming and bilateral roaming
agreements. So we are rolling out the KNS number system, which is called Carrier Number System.
And as part of that, we are offering a variety of different phone and SMS and cellular services.
Now, those include fully enabled primary phone services, as well as secondary and forwarding
services. So we plan on having a mix of different use cases, like first of all, cellular services,
like most of us have today. Or we're also looking at secondary, which might be social
accounts, video games, you might want an inexpensive forwarding number. And you might even
want a number that you could just throw away for whatever reason, right? And then that's where the
privacy reasons will come into play. So you might not want to give out your phone number,
you might want a secondary eSIM on your phone, you might want to go roaming in different countries.
These are some of the use cases for having a phone number.
Yeah, those are really fascinating. And I was curious too, will users have 5G bandwidth and
going forward with new generations, could you do software upgrades to those radios?
Yeah, so our network is capable of doing 3G, 4G and 5G. It really depends on where the spectrum is
and what spectrum we have in those current areas, because we're looking to launch in
many different jurisdictions, US or Canada, or even anywhere in the world. And so it really
is up to the spectrum. And it's really up to the radios that are provided in those regions.
And so I imagine with each one, you have to deal with government regulation as far as the spectrum
is available. Yeah, so in terms of the government regulations, we have a full understanding in
Canada, US and in some of the different jurisdictions around the world. Our CEO,
Samur Beshay, has had 25 years of experience in telecom, having run one of the large
C-LEX in Canada. And so that's given us a huge perspective on regulation.
Great. And just I think we've kind of touched on this already. But it seems like your market
reach is kind of potentially all around the world.
Yeah, so our market reach has been like, if you look at connectivity, there's over one third of
the world that's not connected. As Nahid was saying, in the first part, when it comes down
to connectivity, we have one third potential to reach out. And so that means we can go to
remote communities, we can have deployers install these radios, and connect the digital divide,
as we call it. Now, we could start rolling out in these less connected communities,
but that's not the only revenue stream for us. So for us, what we're looking at is the
bilateral roaming agreements that some other telecoms are looking at, especially when you
look at densification. Now, densification means highly densely populated areas. So
those are malls, those are underground garages, those are campuses. And there's like a big
problem that the M&Os are trying to solve today. And of that big problem, they're looking at how
do we fix those issues. So if you're downtown metropolitan, you know, Manhattan city in New
York, there's a lot of dead spots that are underground, or a lot of dead spots in buildings.
And it's not easy for the telecom giants like, you know, AT&T or T-Mobile to be able to put their
radios in those buildings. And it might be just up to the landlord. So a lot of the landlords can
now purchase these radios, put them in and earn income from those radios specifically. And those
are what we call fento cells. And that's the biggest thing that I think at the end of the
day, it's giving us a clear picture of creating these roaming agreements and adding more.
And then to top it off, our POCs that we have deployed so far have been showing huge,
tremendous support in terms of the number of people that are trying to connect to it,
as well as we're seeing some of the M&Os that are attempting to roam on us,
but we don't have a roaming agreement with them yet. And it could be, you know, roaming from
China coming into Canada. And we can literally take that and create a roaming agreement.
Okay, my mic seems to be back on. It seems like we all suddenly got muted.
Oh, yeah, fair enough. Oh, we're all back. Good. Technical difficulty. Sorry about that,
everybody. But Andrew, if you want to go on.
Yeah, so I guess you want to start from the top or should I?
Oh, I think we got what you're talking about is passing out. If you had any follow up on that.
One thing I'm interested in is the potential for a building or business to offer this service as a
differentiator that they could say, Oh, you can get this service would normally be a dead
spot or normally only be serviced by one particular telco from our location.
Yeah, so those telcos, they don't necessarily get access to everywhere, right? So they have to find
a place, they have to go rent it, they have to go and put fiber into the area just to be able to
service a radio in that region. And they might have access throughout and it's always up to,
you know, access, right? So at the end of the day, if a telco wants to put in a building,
they have to ask the landlord, they have to get all this special permission. So there are some
instances where landlords can get these radios, install them into their buildings or install them
into underground garages and be able to earn income from just that alone.
Great. Okay. And I want to move on because we do have some questions, pre submitted questions,
community questions, and the heed, I'll point to most of these of you and Andrew,
if you want to jump in on these two, that's good. Let's start off with carrier one is what
we call it deep, deep in, which is decentralized, the physical infrastructure and d what d y
decentralized wireless. So, Nikki, can you talk about the difference between carrier one and other
d y projects? Yeah, so one of the main differences right off the bat is we're strictly focused on
carrier grade infrastructure. So a lot of these other d y projects have been just focused on kind of
selling a cheaper hardware just to kind of like, build out the network or to just have people
buying into their radios and installing them and not so much focused on all the requirements needed
to keep a radio upkeep and properly maintained. So one of the main reasons for us going with
that approach is we're really interested on kind of like, bringing that digital divide between
telco and one three, and no one's really going to use none of the telecom providers are really
interested in using the current radios out there. So just to give an idea with like, for example,
helium, even though they're got that whole agreement with T mobile, and they're now selling
plans as like an MVNO, it's not like T mobile is using their radios, or they're interested in
using their radios, because they're not willing to take that risk. So that's been a big focus of
ours to just really push out carrier grade infrastructures and kind of like, touching back on
the point of how we're looking at working with like, a bunch of different deployers to properly
install these networks. Another point too, is right off the bat, we're not focused on
just becoming an MVNO or MNO, we're actually looking to become a mobile virtual network
enabler. So that involves working with like, all different types of telcos to have them actually
using our equipment and actually driving usage and revenue to our radios, opposed to just installing
a radio that's never going to be used or used very minimally. And then eventually we plan to
expand the network to offer those other services like mobile plans and other mobile services
that will then in turn be used back and forth between us and other telecom providers.
Great. And when we're talking about these different nodes, the radios themselves,
and the people that set them up, I understand. So there's going to be a token that compensates
those users similar to a validator on the sweet network. Yeah, so we're going to have kind of like
a two tier approach to how deployers will get paid out. So one of them will be just strictly
based on usage. And the other would be similar to how any other crypto node will get paid out
nowadays. So it'll be based on some sort of like algorithm or some sort of rate defined by
the carrier DAO that will reward them and kind of like incentivize those radio departments.
As the network grows, we are hoping that with that equilibrium effect, eventually,
the radios will start earning more based on the usage and a lot less based on the incentives
from the network eventually until they're earning all based on usage or very minimally
from the network effect. So the token is mainly used primarily in that sense at first to really
drive these deployers and drive these deployment or installations of the radios on the network.
And then eventually, as what they're self-sufficient, it'll be mainly based on the fees that they
get from actual usage. Great. And I've got another question about the handsets. Will
Carrier One have its own smartphone or what smartphones? You mentioned eSIMs,
of course. So I assume any smartphone that can use an eSIM will work.
Yeah. So any, well, we got a lot of questions about the sweet phone and as much of it,
we want to entertain a sweet phone. It's not on our short term roadmap. We are hoping eventually
once we get big enough and hopefully as we grow with sweet, that is something that we could
potentially entertain in the terms of short term. It's not really on there. And then, yeah,
just to touch up on the point with like the eSIM, almost any phone nowadays works with an eSIM.
So anyone will be able to use the network as long as their phone is compatible with eSIMs.
Okay. And next question I have here is when will the network be up and running? When will there
be active users on it? And how many users do you expect to have it once it's active during its
first year? Okay. So on that point, I guess there's a few different parts of the network.
So one would be the carrier number system, which we're looking to launch before we actually get
retail radio deployments going. A main reason for that is we're really trying to reach out to the
whole Web3 and crypto community. And a lot of these other DY projects are kind of region locked
with their radio deployments and their cell phone plans. The approach we're taking with KNS isn't
really region locked. Anyone will be able to get a KNS number and Web3 number and connect it to
SWE and start using it for transactions, verification, or SIM swap protection. So in that sense,
we're hoping to get that system out around Q2, Q3, depending if everything goes well with development.
In terms of radio deployments, we're hoping to get it done after our actual token launch,
which again, I'd say is probably like Q2, Q3. And then in terms of networks on the user,
it's a little bit different in terms of metrics. And you touched up on it a little earlier.
Currently, we already have some POCs running just to kind of like proof of concept that other
carriers will roam off our radios and network users will actually connect to our radios and
generate revenue. And we already have seen like tens of thousands of mobile users and devices
connecting to our radios and the small amount of POCs that we have. So we're actually projecting
once we get in more serious with the US market, which we've just started entering within the
last month. And we have a few proofs of concepts with the players that we're setting up right now
to see those numbers increase to like the hundreds of thousands, to be honest, in terms of
other networks and devices and roaming agreements connecting on our network.
In terms of mobile plans, we haven't really set projections yet. But we do think if we do it
right, we could see a fair bit of amount by the end of the year, hopefully.
And will you be publishing a connectivity map on your site to let people know where they can
connect? Right now, we do have an explorer, just a basic one showing which radios we have
connected to our network in Canada. And we do plan to expand that more just to give people an
idea of like, where we're going to be deploying radios, or like you just touched up on where
they can connect to it, or areas that are looking more profitable and whatnot. And we plan to really
expand that to include a lot of different features as we grow the network.
Great, thanks. And here's a final interesting question here, community question.
Concerning leveraging end user devices, can a smartphone actually be a node on the network
in any way? So not necessarily a node on the network, but we have already looked into,
and we are planning on kind of leveraging those to help map out areas where it is bad connectivity,
or the connectivity is could be better, or there is no connectivity at all. So eventually,
we do plan to release some sort of app that will reward users for pointing that out and
kind of like helping to fill in the gap where radios could be installed and be generating
revenue. And people will be able to earn off of that, but they won't necessarily be a node on
the network, if that makes sense. Absolutely. Yeah. So we're talking about is the phones become
sort of a probe and give you feedback to when they're not connected or when they're experiencing
different maybe levels of connectivity. That's yeah, that's very interesting. We're getting to
time here. So let me go back to Andrew for any final thoughts on carrier one and the pin.
Yeah, so we really are trying to push towards a whole global connectivity across the globe.
We really think that we can bridge the digital divide that currently exists. And we do believe
at the end of the day, what we're doing will actually help out in terms of moving our
entire economy forward and so forth, in terms of, you know, internet connectivity and so forth.
Great, thanks Andrew. And Naheed, any final thoughts?
Honestly, just really bullish on with SWE and carrier one, I do feel that in terms of
what SWE is offering, no other blockchain is really going to be able to fulfill what we're doing.
And I do feel that the potential for growth with both of them is going to be huge. And we're
expecting to really help bridge like that digital divide between web three and SWE at the end of
the day. And I think both parties have a really good vision and are aligned in getting that done.
Great, thank you. You know, there's so much potential here for taking web three to the real world and
in real world impact. I'm always excited by these ideas and projects. So thank you very much for
joining Andrew and Naheed. And thank everybody for listening. Stay tuned to our Twitter feed where
we will have another space scheduled for next Thursday. And join us again and stay tuned for
more content. Yeah, thank you guys. Yep, thank you.