Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
GnosisDAO Community Call with Althea
Recorded: Jan. 11, 2024 Duration: 0:48:10Space Recording
Full Transcription
I sent you a speaker invite in your DMs, so just check there.
Hopefully, Twitter spaces will cooperate with us today.
Hey, everyone. I'm having trouble with my audio. Is everyone able to hear me okay?
Yep, I can hear you loud and clear.
Oh, fantastic.
So, all good.
And I can now finally hear you. So, I apologize about that.
No, no worries. Twitter Spaces is not too great. But we'll get started in just a second.
All right, cool. Let's kick this off here. So, this is the Gnosis DAO community call for the month of January. And it's 2024. So, Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you for making the time.
My name is John. I'm a Gnosis DAO contributor. And please note that this call is being recorded.
So, for today's agenda, the call includes a short governance update on the DAO side. Then we'll hand it over to Alex for updates from Kyle. And then we also have a Gnosis chain update from Philip. And then we have Deborah St. Pierre on the call with us today, co-founder of the Althea network.
So, after the ecosystem updates, we'll chat with Deborah. So, to kick it off here, a quick Gnosis DAO governance update. Up on the forum in Phase 1, which is about to go to Phase 2, we have GIP 91.
Should the Gnosis DAO. Should the Gnosis DAO onboard into Centrifuge Prime. So, for you RWA fans out there, this is an interesting one.
So, real quick, a summary of that GIP. This proposal initiates the onboarding of Gnosis DAO into Centrifuge Prime.
The onboarding will be contingent upon the establishment of a legal conduit for Gnosis DAO by Centrifuge for the investment of RWAs.
This proposal will integrate existing treasury management processes and services providers such as Karpaki DAO.
And the benefit of this proposal will provide the Gnosis DAO treasury with an additional diversified source of yield, a resilient legal infrastructure for engaging with RWA investments, and access to additional diversified sources of credit through Centrifuge.
So, if you're interested to learn more about that proposal, head over to the Gnosis DAO forum.
And that will soon be up on Snapshot, I believe, either today or tomorrow.
And that's it for updates from the DAO. Let's hand it over to Philip for an update on Gnosis Chain.
Thanks, John.
Yeah, so, regarding Gnosis Chain, I guess the biggest news right now is that we set a date for the Shadow hard fork.
So, Shadow, of course, is our testnet, and the hard fork is for Denkun, very similarly to Ethereum.
So, yeah, we stayed in line with Ethereum.
So, they actually have three hard forks, or testnet hard forks, I mean, which are like Gurley, Sepolia, and Holesky.
And we are actually forking the day after Sepolia, so right in the middle of the three of them,
which is January 31st, sorry, at, I think, 6.15 UTC, if I'm not mistaken.
So, yeah, if you're running Shadow validators or even nodes, please upgrade.
We don't have the configs quite yet, but make sure to, well, spare some time on the day before,
maybe on January 30th or something, to update all your nodes, because if not, they will stop working.
And, of course, this is a very good test for Nose's Chain specifically.
If you have any issues, please comment on the Discord.
We're doing everything we can to onboard the most people possible on Shadow specifically.
Yeah, because, I mean, if we find issues, then that's great, and we will fix them for mainnets.
Yes, so thanks for participating in that.
I guess except for that, there's not that much.
We're very focused on the hard fork.
So I'll just give a quick, I mean, reminder about what this entails.
So Dencoin is basically, well, it's mostly for the blobs, so proto-dank sharding, which will basically make Layer 2 blockchains more, less, I mean, it will be less expensive for them to run on a Layer 1.
So Ethereum is exactly the same.
And we are just keeping track of, well, score, I guess, for Ethereum and following exactly in the footsteps.
Yeah, I guess that's it for me.
Thank you, Philip.
And let's hand it over to Alex for updates about Kau.
So this month, actually, like, it's been quite relaxed, you know, everyone has been on holidays, chilling, enjoying the Christmas festivities.
So there aren't many updates since I last jumped in this call, but mainly there are four main updates.
The first one is that finally someone really good solved MasterCow's treasure hunt.
And basically the treasure hunt was, as the name says, a treasure hunt where developers had to dig through the new programmatic order framework with the safe wallet to actually create, decipher a clue.
And from there, create a programmatic order into the code protocol order book that basically sold the assets from the safe that they were trying to break and handed the assets to themselves.
So someone around two days ago communicated to us on Discord that they finally solved the puzzles.
And then the second update, it's also related to the use of programmatic orders and the use of safe wallet because we, before the break of Christmas, we launched a feature in the front end.
If you use TWAP before, you actually had to do the math to know the final execution price of your entire TWAP order.
So you had to basically add up the execution price of each single TWAP part and this could lead to errors because, I mean, if it was a short TWAP, the math can be easy, but if it's a long TWAP, it's time consuming and, you know, it's kind of tricky to add all these like long decimal numbers.
So now in the history panel, you actually have a total execution price, very easy to see for you.
And then another thing that we did over the Christmas break, since we have more time to focus on like, you know, stuff that is a small, how to say, small prior, but actually quite relevant for the ecosystem is that within the CAB protocol Discord,
we launched the chain patrol Discord board that allows any user from the, within the CAB protocol Discord to basically report any suspicious activity URL or person in a way that then chain patrol receives a notification and proceeds to take down the spam URL so that no one gets, gets pitched.
And lastly, and lastly, actually, this is quite hot, I would say hot from the oven because it was posted to two days ago.
Two days ago, there is a CIP proposal open for polling for CalDAO, which asks for the testing feed models for Cal protocol.
Basically, in this CIP, we determine if CalDAO is to test feed models for the purpose of generating revenue for Cal protocol and does the CalDAO.
And if you have any sort of cow tokens, whether it be cow, cow or any other strategy that's allowed to actually vote, please go vote because right now the proposal is still 20 million under quorum, but currently like everyone is, is for the proposal to pass.
So really looking forward to see the result of, of this, of this proposal.
And this is all I have for today, John.
Thank you so much, Alex.
And just a heads up.
I've shared links on the call today on this Twitter spaces for a governance update.
Our validator newsletter, which goes over everything about the hard fork upcoming on Chiado for Dankun and also linked our newsletter, the notes chain newsletter.
So if you're interested, go take a look there.
And let's hand it over to Deborah.
Hand it over to Deborah.
So today we're, we're joined by Deborah Sempierre, co-founder of the Althea Network.
We're so excited to have you, Deborah.
Thanks for making the time.
Just a quick intro before we talk.
So the Althea Network is the payment layer powering infrastructure and connectivity.
Primarily, it's a machine to machine microtransactions and payments, but I'm sure we'll dig into more of that today.
Althea is part of the very hot deep end sector of the Web3 economy that's decentralized physical infrastructure network for those who are not familiar with that acronym.
Deborah, so yeah, thanks for joining us.
I know primarily you're here today to talk about the launch of your VIP private beta for liquid infrastructure.
But before we do that, let's jump into what Althea is and if you can introduce yourself and just, yeah, tell us more about Althea.
Yeah, thanks so much for queuing up that intro.
And thanks so much for having me here today.
As you were saying, I'm Deborah.
I'm the co-founder of Althea platform and the CEO of the company behind the platform called Hawk Networks.
And yeah, Althea basically was envisioned way back in 2017 with a with a hard kind of hard look at the systems of the utilities of the Internet infrastructure.
You know, why, you know, why can you have an open market in the Internet exchange that worked quite well and had low cost bandwidth and, you know, open access to that?
And then at the at the edge device, things became, you know, captured, value captured differently and became siloed and monopolistic and, you know, things began to break down.
So Althea is the vision that that you can create that at that same open market and software to find connectivity all the way down to the device and that machines and utilities can have programmatic payments.
Because all of that together really enables new ways of, you know, funding, building and operating utilities and infrastructure, which, you know, and I think that's the disruptive unlock to, you know, the next future of how we how we create more egalitarian systems.
And so, yeah, super excited to talk with you all today.
We for those that maybe don't know, we've been on Gnosis chain, utilizing the infrastructure there with XDAI since 2019 and been one of the larger projects, if not the largest project, certainly for several years running as we send these microtransactions of XDAI all around between the different machines, which in this case is routers in a programmatic way and kind of microtransactions.
And so have been, you know, working together with the community and now, you know, coming up into this launch of, you know, liquid infrastructure, which we can definitely dig deep dive into.
I'm excited about that, that intersection with RWA and then, of course, what Gnosis chain is doing with Centrifuge, too.
Cool. Yeah.
Althea is a great project.
And as you said, you've been around for a long time and you're even, you were on the, or in the Cosmos ecosystem for a while.
I remember that.
I remember speaking to people there and saying, hey, what are some cool projects going on in Cosmos?
And everyone would always mention Althea.
Real quick, I guess, while we're on the topic.
So why, why did you choose Gnosis chain or XDAI back then to build on?
Oh, yeah.
We'll have to blast from the past, go back in time.
So when we started Althea, we really thought we were going to use payment channels on Ethereum, right?
So this is 2018.
A lot of other projects were doing that, you know, Spank chain famously was using, you know, payment channels.
So we started back on the Ethereum main chain, utilizing payment channels, and there was a lot of extra complexity.
And I think really, ultimately, why a lot of the other projects beside us abandoned this idea.
And at that time, you know, the XDAI chain, you know, this is before Gnosis, was there as a, you know, inexpensive way.
Speaking of Cosmos, this is, you know, why it makes, this part of the reason why it makes a lot of sense to, you know, utilize the configurability of an inexpensive settlement chain.
To just directly settle payments.
And we said, well, you know, and I think it was kind of coming late into 2018, where we just said, hey, why don't we just direct settle?
And, you know, XDAI was a great, you know, kind of infrastructure for that.
And, you know, it worked really well and allowed us to really get to product market fit from a really early stage.
You know, there was a, there was a Masari article here just recently about the kind of the state of D-Pen.
And it really contrasts the different, you know, go to market between the kind of speculative bursts of Helium, where they're, you know, incentivizing, you know, certain behaviors.
And maybe you have, like, you have some, you know, infrastructure that's going up and, but there's not necessarily any customers to Althea's approach, where we're very revenue driven.
And we, we designed to fulfill customer needs and drive revenue.
And that really, you know, created, allowed us to iterate on a solution to a problem rather than sort of creating the solution and then hoping it fits the problem later.
So I think we've done, you know, we've done pretty well with that.
And, and Exide was, was a big part of allowing us to get to PMF or product market fit very, very early on.
And now you've developed your own layer one, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And that's, that's coming along well too.
I mean, we're, we're actually, you know, kind of in the, the final stages of that.
There's a test net over there going on.
And what, what's great about the, about the layer one is it allows us to develop, you know, almost like a application specific data availability layer and interact with, you know, our existing infrastructure on Gnosis, but also, but also allows us to have, you know, some additional dApps and ecosystem and infrastructure sort of built around.
And then we have kind of all these dials and levers that we can, that we can tune in the settlement on the L1.
So, yeah, I think, I think that's going to be, the modularity that, that's coming really allows us to be cross-chain interoperable in new ways, which is pretty exciting.
And then it allows also other people on the L1, like Electra, who's doing machine-to-machine payments for EV chargers to build on the Althea L1 as well and interoperate.
And then we have the Gravity Bridge, which does us have options to, with e-stables.
I mean, you kind of already answered the question, you, you know, you first built on XDAI and now Gnosis Chain because you wanted to direct settle.
Just interested to know, you know, why you chose to, to build an L1 rather than, you know, going to an existing L2.
If, you know, scalability was a question or, but you've kind of already answered the question.
I mean, you talked about data availability and direct settling, but, but go for it.
Yeah.
I mean, so one of the really interesting things, because we did develop this and, you know, together now with many people that use this as their daily internet, you know, sandwich shops.
And then we even have banks that are using Althea as their daily internet.
You really, really understand viscerally the high uptime requirements for the settlement and payment layers, as well as, you know, the connectivity.
So what we, you know, having, you know, light clients or having the validation and staking and node firmware be embedded and modular in pieces of the router firmware as well allows us to get greater resiliency.
So I, I, and I think, you know, that's really how we enable a lot of scaling is that we can, you know, allow kind of decentralization of these nodes.
There's a high uptime requirement for them, but I, you know, we also envision there will be quite a bit of cross-chain interoperability.
We, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll interoperate with the infrastructure that's on Gnosis chain as well as run the L1.
Cool.
Well, let's, let's jump into some of the, the specifics here of Althea.
So first, let's just like really high level for those who may be like myself, who are not super familiar with how the internet really works.
Um, you know, I, I believe that the internet is public good.
I have to buy my internet from like spectrum or whoever it is.
It's terrible.
Um, and I'm sure it's terrible, terrible for most people.
Um, so you've, you've used the analogy of, um, real estate and like a landlord and a property manager to talk about, uh, how Althea is like disintermediating the internet.
Um, can you, can you kind of run with that analogy a little bit to help us understand how Althea is, is, uh, is a infrastructure provider and like how they're doing things differently than, uh, your, your typical or how the internet typically works.
Yeah. Um, so there's a couple of key pillars here. Um, and with the analogy that you're speaking about, this is kind of the second pillar.
And this pillar really speaks to, um, the open access nature of the Althea system, um, which allows any, any, any infrastructure to provide service to a network and any device to connect.
Um, so as you were speaking right now, if you have a traditional ISP, um, you, you have the service layer, uh, so like when you get a $50 a month connection from Comcast, you get service, you get infrastructure, uh, and then you have bandwidth, which is the three things you're actually getting when you're sort of getting internet to your home, right?
You get someone you can call at 3am when something's the matter, you get bandwidth delivered, and then you get some sort of glass, you know, fiber or coax cable or, you know, wireless connection.
So all these three things are kind of bundled into one, but because of that, it's very siloed, right?
They have to, you know, they can't allow you to continue to, uh, rebroadcast your connection.
Um, no devices can be part of, you know, no, no extra infrastructure can be added.
Um, and then they make sure that your devices are very siloed and, you know, what you can and can't do on the internet.
Um, or, you know, oftentimes you have data caps, right?
So it's effectively metered.
Um, so, but that's created a lot of the siloing that we see a lot of these data ends.
And in fact, it's really interesting if you look at the broadband mapping in the U.S., you see they have this BDC map and it has all these little dots for connected and red dots for unconnected.
So you'll see a bunch of green dots that say, oh, I'm connected right next to red dots that are unconnected people.
Um, and it's about one in four people in the U.S. are under or unconnected in the end, which is quite high.
Um, but it's because of this, like, strange value capture mechanism that bundles all of those things together, which really doesn't allow for permissionless infrastructure, um, or permissionless device usage.
So what Althea does is really open that up and, like, basically it disaggregates or separates up the infrastructure payments from the, uh, payments to the service layer.
So you can have people invest in infrastructure.
Different devices can be part of, uh, that infrastructure of a network, whether that's fiber or radios, and then they can get paid programmatically.
And then another, another entity can be the service layer.
And then those, that infrastructure can be part of many different networks and get paid programmatically.
This also lets us do something that we're very excited about, which is liquid infrastructure.
It allows people to have funding into the infrastructure itself while someone else can manage it.
So this allows an enterprise to say, okay, I'm going to come along and I'm going to build, uh, maybe I'm a truck manufacturer.
Or auto manufacturer.
I'm going to build my own private network, uh, and someone else will manage it.
Uh, and then you can receive, you know, kind of funding and own part of that infrastructure and receive that programmatic payment without having to be the one that gets the 3 a.m. call.
And, and also it can be part of a larger permissionless network.
So that's pretty exciting.
Uh, there is one other pillar if I can, um, kind of segue into, uh, into that from the user perspective.
Yeah, absolutely.
Please.
So the other very interesting thing, as I mentioned, one in four people in the U.S. don't have a connection to the internet.
Um, that aligns with the 72 million people in the U.S. that are using prepaid phones.
Because consumers also don't want to consume or purchase internet, uh, or connectivity in the state, in that way either.
And if they have a choice about one in four, one in three, or getting, you know, internet in a retail-like transaction.
So, prepaid phones, you walk into Walmart, you got 50 bucks in your pocket, you buy a phone, maybe you buy, like, an apple and a shirt or something like that.
And you walk out the door.
They don't ask it who you are.
They don't need your first, you know, the blood of your firstborn.
Like, the, all of the things that we require people to do when they get internet to their home.
Maybe they have to have a credit check.
And it precludes a large segment of the population when you should just be able to connect to a network.
And like I said, pay a few bucks, come in with cash, um, and get on the network.
And that's, when we create this open and permissionless infrastructure, it's also pay-as-you-go.
It's also prepaid.
It's also very flexible in your, uh, your payment methodology, which opens that up to a lot of, a lot of new, uh, more people, new markets for carriers.
Um, and, uh, the, the other kind of critical piece of that is Althea lets you choose your choice of cost or performance on a minute-by-minute basis.
So, not only are you able to pay as you go, you're also able to say, you know, look, I want better costs right now.
I want better late, I want better performance and latency five minutes from now because I want to watch the game.
And, uh, it'll route and then pay programmatically based on that.
So, you have, you create a very smart network, um, that's, that's focused on how a user actually wants to receive, uh, connectivity.
Thank you so much for that wonderful explanation.
Um, I mean, just, just from the perspective of, uh, you know, a retail user myself, like you're solving, or at least attempting to solve so many pain points out there that, um, I would love to see solved.
Because, um, like I said, I, I mean, the, the internet is a, is a public good, and, um, there's just, uh, so, so many issues with the way that, um, um, you know, your phone works or, um, you know, my parents live out in a rural area, they don't have the internet, um, and it's 2024.
It's, uh, it's a, it's a bit ridiculous.
Um, let's see here.
Uh, let's, will you talk, will you, will you let us know about the, uh, the VIP private beta launch for, uh, the concept of, uh, liquid infrastructure?
And, you know, you talked a little bit about it, but why don't you touch, touch on it once again?
Absolutely.
And let me, yeah, give a little bit of context of how we got there.
Um, you know, as I said, we, we've been, uh, utilizing the Gnosis chain and XI and, you know, growing at a great rate.
It's obviously been solving a lot of those pain points and we're connecting people in places, um, and in segments of the population that we're not able to be connected.
The economics didn't work.
Um, and in fact, actually, if you go to our blog, we, um, we, we were just talking about how we connecting people up in Ulu, up in the North, uh, Northwest territories there in the Arctic Circle.
That's kind of a fun story.
You got, you know, 408 people way up in the Arctic Circle that are, you know, using the Althea connectivity tech.
It's, it's pretty exciting.
Um, but we realized that, uh, in order to scale telecom and infrastructure networks are quite, you know, cost heavy, you know?
And what was interesting to see, uh, it is, um, a lot of the reasons why telco does become monopolized is because the, the, the infrastructure itself is fairly, you know, debt heavy.
So you see, um, you know, telcos taking out a lot of debt, they have a lot of assets that aren't always leveraged.
Um, there's the, there's close to two point something trillion in, um, you know, collateral or, uh, uh, telecom assets across the, just the top, you know, the top 30 telcos in the world.
Um, and they aren't really able to leverage that.
So they have all of these assets, um, but on the same token, they're also extremely debt heavy and that makes it, makes it very risky.
And it also makes it really precludes smaller operators and infrastructure players from really being able to participate in that market because it is one so risky.
It's so debt heavy.
And two, um, you're not really able to leverage it.
And then three, no one cannot, you know, it's very, very difficult for, you know, folks that are, um, you know, maybe they're accredited or even, you know, the family offices, how do you invest in telco right now?
I mean, how do you own part of the infrastructure of your network, uh, in maybe a newer town or your city?
It's, it's, it's near impossible, but you could go buy a piece of real estate, um, and participate in real estate markets.
But, you know, owning a piece of infrastructure is, is, uh, very, very difficult to do right now.
And in fact, it's, it's primarily that you have to purchase equity in a, um, uh, or stock in a company.
So then you're having to deal with the potential risk of the operation as well as investing in the underlying asset.
So critically, as we were talking about earlier, that disaggregation is the real key.
You have open infrastructure, and then it's separated from the management and the service and operation layer.
And Althea programmatically pays both, right?
So it pays a time-based payment to those folks that are managing those operators, um, the system integrators that are managing the network.
And then it pays a, a, a meter fee to the infrastructure providers.
So with liquid infrastructure, we're bringing that funding piece of it for the infrastructure itself on chain.
And that's what's, that's what's so dang exciting is, you know, see all these RWAs.
And for the most part, also, it's a sort of abstracted away.
It's like, oh, we say this is real estate.
We say this is, um, you know, whatever else.
But the, the, the, the connection is not there on chain, but with Althea, basically the machine to machine transactions occur across accounts and liquid infrastructure is actually just tokenizing the account associated with a network.
So account associated with a radio tower, uh, the, uh, accounts associated with, you know, maybe fiber in a, in an MDU, um, and that account is earning the revenue kind of coming, you know, from the people using the network.
And that's coming in as microtransactions on a minute by minute basis.
So you see 30 cents, 50 cents, 10 cents, um, you know, kind of coming through.
And, uh, then you actually, we call it liquefying.
You take and liquefy that account as an NFT.
Uh, and for the beta, we're doing something really interesting where we're actually taking and pooling all of those NFTs together.
And then the funders, uh, are, um, uh, are able to buy shares in that pool or, or, or, or pool tokens, I guess would be a better way to say that.
Um, and, uh, what's neat because you're getting paid on a minute by minute basis.
You can claim your funds on a minute by minute basis, um, or, you know, as often as you'd like.
And, uh, it, it creates an opportunity to participate in that, that market.
And then for Althea and our, and our, um, our growth trajectory, it gives us an opportunity to scale.
It pours capital in the networks that are, uh, and builders that are, are growing networks and providing that solution.
So it's, it's, it's a very exciting inflection point.
Um, and, uh, we have the, the VIP kind of private beta open right now.
Um, so, you know, feel free to reach out if you'd like to be a part of that.
Um, so yeah, we're, we're, we're pretty excited.
That's actually launching, um, uh, next week.
Great.
Yeah.
I, I shared, uh, your blog on the comment section here of the call.
Um, and also your, your article about introducing liquid infrastructure.
Um, yeah, I mean, there's so many aspects to this that are super interesting and, um, I feel like there's so many different directions that we could take this in.
I, I, I am, uh, yeah, I just want to quickly ask you, so let's say I'm like a farmer and I come to you and I say, Debra, I, I heard about Althea.
I grow potatoes.
Um, and, um, you know, I'm not, I'm not super pleased with my, um, my telecom solutions and my internet.
I live in obviously a very rural area.
It's spotty, not reliable.
And I also want to own my own infrastructure.
Um, could you just, you know, quickly walk us through how, how you would onboard someone like that?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think this is a, this is a great, um, introduction to, uh, Hawk Networks.
So, um, mentioned before Hawk Networks developed the IP for the Althea platform.
Um, but we also provide a lot of, you know, system integration and some of the, you know, the, uh, design and work, uh, and support for people that are looking to build that.
That maybe don't, that need capacity building and understanding and that educational piece of it.
Um, another big thing that we're doing soon is what we call Althea chapters.
Um, which will also provide some of that education and design and support on a local level, you know, throughout the, throughout the world, actually.
um so we'll be talking about that a little bit later um but so you're a farmer you're really
excited to own your own infrastructure and actually it's really key because the ip of the
future the intellectual property the future is actually that data that's coming off of your
potato farm so right now you probably have some sensors on your farm um it's telling you everything
about your soul and everything else but that's probably getting you know going through the john
deer network or uh or or something like that or and that ip you're not able to keep sovereign or
private to uh to yourself that um so what we can't what we can do um we can get you set up with the
kits um is build a lte based infrastructure that connects to your smart farm implements your
autonomous vehicles and your sensors um and then is hosted locally so that network and that
information can stay private your information stays sovereign but the connectivity piece of that um
you know lte 5g infrastructure can provide internet to your local community as well and sustainable
revenue for you um and a local you know network operator or potentially even hawk networks as a
virtual network operator can provide the service so the farmer doesn't have to wake up 3 a.m when
their neighbors don't like have trouble with the internet either um which is a key piece to kind of
also how althea is a bit um you know handles how infrastructure is operated which is different than a
lot of dpin a lot of dpin is only infrastructure and doesn't really focus on you know how service and
management is gonna um be paid and incentivized uh so you give hawk networks a quick call we'd help you
with um you know getting you to the right place or potentially your local althea chapter um as that
grows out and um get started on that pathway get an inexpensive kit basically for less than a thousand
bucks you can have a local private uh lte network that'll connect all your farming implements and keep
your data where it should be and you know obviously a lot of these uh the aspects that you're talking
about of you know telecom and and the internet um are siloed for like very specific reasons um of course
we live under capitalism and uh there there are uh you know very large forces out there who have a
vested interest in keeping these services siloed and uh they want it to be monopolistic so what kind
of like legal headwinds are is uh althea having to deal with and and uh you know that that must be a
difficult aspect of of your work you know it's interesting um because one of the things that
blockchain lets us do is provide ways uh and build systems with alignment and one of the things i think
althea does very well is align providers and users together so that there's a win-win situation
um and as i spoke earlier there's a large segment of the market um if you think about it from a
purely business perspective you know you have a 25 percent you know total addressable market or you
know that or a market share that carriers just can't access right now i remember even i mean i was
having a conversation with google fiber and they had said look we we know how to build fiber
the the unit we we know how to charge someone 70 a month and that's all we know how to do but we
have a suspicion we know we're missing a bunch of people by only having this one you know solution so
they wanted to work on that you know utilizing the althea platform to to provide that or we worked with
a auto manufacturer who um you know they were they they uh had a large amount of connectivity costs
they wanted to pour that money into building private infrastructure that was you know utilized also
publicly and earn revenue back again the althea platform works great and that's also better ends up
also better for users so it's it's it's really quite um great because it's a tech stack it's neutral and
agnostic and that's a big part of the vision of althea um is that you're creating um like tcp ip
or google you're creating an open and agnostic platform that both any carrier uh verizon eclero
uh uh deutsche telecom anyone can utilize that um in a non-competitive way it's not at&t's
proprietary platform um but it also then aligns everyone together so so far um you know we've had
actually quite a bit of success with um carriers actually just you know being interested in using
using the tech stack to access more more market share too um so it's been pretty great oh we also
have um you know some isp licenses where they are regulatorily um compliant in uh in in africa and
ghana nigeria and nigeria also we went through and did the process of talking to the government about the
payment platform and so they also okay not only the althea connectivity but also the althea payment
platform in nigeria which is great because they you know sometimes governments can be a bit
resistant to um crypto um but because it is performing this important service to connect more
people you really open up a lot of doors yeah super interesting um okay last few questions here
and then we'll call it um because i know you got to go and you're a busy person just like
everyone on the call here so um if anyone on the call wants to become a an althea customer or you
know if i want to use althea as my service provider is that possible
yeah absolutely um and i think also the chapters are a big part of that too so if you just want to
get involved in you know you aren't able to be an althea customer or able to tackle becoming an
althea service provider we'd love to have you on board you know sharing that vision and being part of
that future with it with a chapter um so please reach out to hello at althea.net um you know or
find us on discord twitter um we'd be happy to help you know get you plugged in uh in any way
there and if you're in a local althea you know area we should have a map soon y'all i know we've
been talking about a map forever and ever so um map is coming soon trademark um that'll allow people
to go oh yeah i'm here or there whatever but um yeah uh definitely reach out to us and there's
ways to support that vision in many different ways great thank you so much deborah um okay one one last
question while i have you here um you know dpin is a is a popular narrative right now do you do you
feel like it's gaining you know momentum and attention for the right reasons like do you think
this is a shelling point for dpin right now or you know what are your thoughts on on that kind of meme
it's interesting right i i think that with or without blockchain um infrastructure is becoming
decentralized it is a movement that is happening um it you know you see decentralized energy grid
is a big part of it right you know everybody has uh you know batteries and storage now in their
homes and in their cars the centralized electric grid and energy is of course going to be a thing
of the past just the way and also althea can be the machine to machine payments on the on the uh
on the grid uh as well um but that's probably a topic for another spaces uh you know so i think
the movement of decentralized physical infrastructure is inevitable um it is coming and i believe the
blockchain makes a lot of blockchain makes a lot of sense to be the underlying agnostic and neutral
platforms that allow that to um be a better system the i think that some of the incentive structures are
unsustainable so what ends up happening is you incentivize behaviors that don't bring about sustainable
revenue um you know i always i kind of mention this a lot but there's like a frank lloyd wright the
famous architects quote that we design systems or we design we architect a building and then it
architects us um but it really speaks to the intent and purpose of how we design um and then of course
the product that's outcome from that so if we design a system that incentivizes people for coverage
like for example in telecom um or we incentivize people to sort of put out a bunch of unusable
um products uh then that that that doesn't create sustainable and resilient infrastructure
um so from our viewpoint that it would it would behoove the industry for deep end to really focus
on how we build revenue that's uh revenue generation and things that solve that that solution that
will have sustainable infrastructure because we do end up you know right now there's a lot of
infrastructure being put out there that isn't necessarily going to be useful as soon as we
aren't incentivizing it anymore yeah i love mission i love the vision um you know we'll have you
anytime so thank you so much for for making the time and joining us today um are there any like
upcoming talks or events or anything that you'd like to draw our attention to yeah absolutely we i'm
i'm sure that at least part of the team will be at east denver um we'd love to see you of course
there um and uh you know if if folks are involved in telecom we'll probably be at mobile congress
um and i'm actually in dallas area now if if uh if anyone's in the area would love to to meet up
with them and then i'll be in colorado um sometime in the next two or three weeks too so um yeah uh feel
free to reach out on my twitter you know if you're uh in the area and we'll grab a coffee
great actually i'll be at east denver so see you there and uh likewise if um if anyone on the call
is going to be at east denver please reach out um and uh see you there thank you so much everyone
for making the time thank you deborah once again and we'll see you next month for the um march oh
sorry february installment of the community call and that will happen on the second thursday
of the month which is uh thursday february 15th so take care everyone and see you on chain thanks
thanks everyone
Host
GnosisDAO
from
Gnosis DAO
