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Welcome to the first edition of the State of the Economy of Things. This periodic report aims to answer one key question; what's already possible in the Economy of Things today?
The Economy of Things is a decentralized network-economy built and owned by the people and machines that use it. It’s the next generation of the Internet of Things. It’s what happens when the Internet of Things meets Web3 and AI, and it's what peaq was built to power. And powering it peaq is. 2023 was a record breaking year for peaq, in large part due to the rise of DePIN, short for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. This real-world focused Web3 trend has seen teams all around the world build Web3-based applications for everything from car-sharing, to 5G connectivity, to flight tracking. These are all applications at the center of the Economy of Things -- the beating heart of it, one might say. So we'll be diving deep into DePIN in this report, too. Before we begin, if you'd like to further familiarise yourself with the Economy of Things, read this.
An inside look at how the Economy of Things works with you and for you.
07:11 - DePIN rewards: $1.53
“Today is a special day, guys,” I informed my phone, fighting off a yawn. “Today, or, rather, last night, I made a big buck!”
Needless to say, the phone wasn’t too impressed. I didn’t think the five people watching my Instagram stories would be either, but I’ve grown too used to this ritual not to record a morning vlog.
“So, my battery in California… The tokenized one, I told you last week about penomo, this Web3 real-world asset thing…”
I turned on the tap, filling up the bottle for the run.
“It made a profit! Really, I checked this morning. Also, an MIT guy bought my sleeping data from my fitness watch. And, most importantly… My event agency is about to get its first client!”
That was actually the first thing I learned this morning, when scrolling through the notifications on the phone in those bittersweet fading moments between waking and getting up. Johanna wasn’t uncertain in her choice of words for the past-midnight message:
“Just got off the phone with a hot lead, she’s a total cookie. Hope you like quiet, cause that’s her thing.”
Oh well, I thought, heading out for the stairwell, when life gives you nuts, you make… dough, I guess. We’d better start making dough at this point, as my savings were running out, and the skeleton-crew agency faced gloriless closure.
07:42 - DePIN rewards: $21.87
I spotted the Tesla at my charger from a distance — it was the latest one, the sleek, cool, spaceship-like vehicle. The driver, a tired-looking woman in her 30s, was sipping coffee as she watched something on her phone.
“Hey!” I waved at her. “Sorry to bother, did you figure out the way alright? I’m the owner, and the last guy who used it said the location wasn’t clear on the map…”
“What?” she gave me a confused look. “Oh, the charger? Yeah, I found it alright. So it’s yours?”
“Yup,” I nodded.
“My Tesla’s in repairs now, so I am at least renting off the charger.”
I actually missed my Tesla. It was the one and only memorabilia of the Bitcoin bull run of '21. I got in too late to be driving a Bugatti around Dubai, but driving a Tesla around Vienna cheered me up through the collapse that followed. And I even earned some crypto as I did, thanks to a small MapMetrics-branded locator device I set up under the windscreen which shared my anonymized data Waze-style, but with actual monetizable rewards.
“Oh, so it’s your charger?” she smiled. “Man, you’re a lifesaver! I was literally driving on zero the last two kilometers, with no charger in sight… Found this charge app, this wallet thing is so bizarre! How did you even learn about it?”
“I’ve been dabbling in crypto for a bit,” I smiled. “Got used to the wallets and everything.”
“Oh. Well, hope they fix your Tesla soon.”
“Thanks! Safe travels.”
She did make me miss my Tesla, and I figured I could afford a little celebration today, so I pulled up the ELOOP app and booked a Tesla for my trip to work. I had a bit of their tokens, and I have to say, earning on the very car-sharing ride you do is something I could only imagine in my wildest dreams… And yet, it was reality. Not the kind of reality that buys you a Lambo in a day, but a coffee — very much on the cards.
09:01 - DePIN rewards: $23.14
It took me longer than usual to get to the co-working where Johanna and I would usually meet up — I made a quick detour after the MobiGO app on my phone popped an alert. There was a bounty for a snap of a location I happened to be in the vicinity of (someone must have been very curious about the traffic there), and I made use of the opportunity to snatch an extra reward.
Johanna was already there, tapping away at the keyboard as she sipped her espresso.
“So who’s my cookie?” I asked, sitting down next to her.
“It’s an influencer guru,” she sighed, looking up. “Got her own YouTube channel, millions of subs… All about business, data, and meditation, basically.”
“Cool. I actually started meditating the other day, I’ll look her up.”
“Whatever, Mister New-Age,” she rolled her eyes. “So she wants to do a live session here, for her VIP clients. There’s a few studios that fit the bill, but here’s the catch — she wants the place to be quiet. And she wants us to prove with data that the place is quiet. Cause she’s all about data and such.”
“Oh wow. A regular place with decent soundproofing won’t work?”
“Nope, I asked,” she shook her head. “I was kinda unsure if we got this, but… Anyways, she wants a clear-cut, data-backed proposal by noon New York time. We need a client. Like, we need to sign someone up, or we’re done. So yeah. Got any ideas?”
“None at all.”
14:17 - EoT rewards: $45.87
I was quite happy to learn that someone else had used my charger, earning me another reward, and my antenna hooked to a Raspberry Pi to track the local air traffic was also bringing rewards — if only the quest for a quiet place had been going as smoothly.
Obviously, there was no data on sound pollution in specific areas of the city. I found a few articles alerting of a general noise pollution rise, but that was pretty much it. So after a bit more googling, I grew desperate and decided to visit a few locations myself, pick the one that seemed the quietest, and cook up some data to prove the fit. Things you do to keep your first business afloat…
All the ELOOP cars in the area were taken, and Uber was charging a crazy rate: The public transportation was temporarily on hold because of some sort of an accident, and the service was cashing in on that like crazy. Thankfully, there was another ride-hailing service, a Web3 one, that Johanna had apparently been using for a while — that one was more affordable. I used it to get around a few places, which all seemed reasonably quiet, but I wasn’t sure “reasonable” was good enough for the client.
The driver taking me back to the “office” had his phone’s camera set on the windscreen, and as we drove, it would draw boxes around any vehicles and pedestrians it spotted. Looked cool, it drew my attention.
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“Is it some sort of AI?” I asked. “Is it, like, recognizing things?”
“It’s counting them,” he explained. “It’s called Drive&... You earn rewards for the stuff your phone spots.”
“Cool. Gonna check it out.”
“Go for it,” the driver squinted at the phone. “There’s also another app I am running, Silencio… Similar idea, but it’s using the mic, not the camera. Crowd-sourcing the noise data. It earns me a few tokens.”
“Noise data, you say?” I raised my eyebrows. “Now that’s handy…”
17:53 - EoT rewards: $68.83
I spotted a familiar logo on the router when ordering my latte — it was peaq, the blockchain my charger renting app ran on. I didn’t expect to see it here, and yet, there it was, in all of its purple glory.
“What’s that about?” I asked the owner, the plump Moroccan lady, as she put my cup before me. “The router thingy.”
“Oh, that?” she followed my gaze and smiled. “It’s our router. Basically, we set up two routers, one for the free guest network, and that one’s for the paid one.”
“Why would I pay if there’s a free option?”
“You don’t have to,” she shrugged, then pointed at the flier on my table. “But it’s for charity. A fundraiser to buy books for the school library. You pay with tokens, they go straight to their wallet.”
I ended up paying for my Internet, just for the good karma, as I researched the Silencio app. Wish I could have gotten around to that earlier, but my bank called, and I had to rush there to deal with a pile of documents for the agency’s account. Turned out Silencio had pretty decent coverage over here, and I ended up purchasing the dataset for the city.
We sent the proposal with a comfortable time buffer before noon in New York, and heard back from the guru fast — she seemed impressed. We signed her in no time, and she promised to spread the word to a few friends who were considering gigs in Vienna.
“And with that, we’re officially taking off,” I declared, raising a toast with Johanna to celebrate our first apparent win. “We finally got ourselves our first client, and I’m sure there’s more coming. To the Moon!”
“What’s the Moon got to do with this?” she laughed.
“It’s just, like, a battlecry. We’re all gonna make it, and we’re all gonna be rich, something like that.”
“Well, then,” Johanna shrugged, raising her glass. “To the Moon indeed!”
Decentralized Physical Infratctuture Networks being built on peaq, complete with stats and highlights.
The above story is a work of fiction, but all the DePINs it mentions are very much real — and are already building on peaq. You read that right – that tale from the future is a tale of what’s already possible on peaq today. As of December 2023, there are 20 DePINs building on peaq, with more than 100,000 devices across them and a presence in at least 175 countries.
So without further ado, meet the cast of the show:
2blox is revolutionizing the way people gather mobility data. Its community is building a network of AI-powered cameras that anyone can set up at home to monitor traffic outside; its MobiGO app allows people to earn rewards for taking pictures and videos of various locations, adding a Pokemon Go-style gamification mechanism. It joined the peaqosystem to leverage peaq as its layer-1 backbone.
“We are changing the paradigm for crowdsourcing mobility data by putting it on DePIN rails, and peaq’s DePIN-centric design has boosted our progress toward this goal,”
— Rémy Gierech, founder of 2blox.
MobiGO users: 7,847 across 21 countries
Average user rewards: 89 2blox coins
Total data collected (GB): 7.92 GB (11,835 ,842 detections)
In 2023, 2blox:
Airwaive is disrupting the broadband Web access market by enabling people to set up their own broadband networks and earn tokens for bringing others online. It connects wireless operators with people and businesses eager to set up access points and earn rewards for providing connectivity. Airwaive expanded to peaq to leverage its Machine DeFi capabilities.
Arkreen issues tradeable on-chain certificates for green energy that people produce or consume, enabling them to monetize their sustainable practices as carbon credits. It expanded to the peaqosystem to block extra monetization tools for green energy projects and DePINs on peaq.
“Sustainability is a key priority for all forward-looking projects, and it’s a value we share with peaq and its ecosystem, setting the stage for a lot of synergy,”
— Abba, Head of Product and Partnership at Arkreen.
Total ART Issued: 6,010.84
Total Arkreen Miners: 4,363
Total Green Energy produced:128.9 MWh
Impact: 91.02 Ton CO2 emissions
Countries with presence: 30
In 2023, Arkreen:
bloXmove is decentralizing the mobility and energy industries with a variety of blockchain-powered solutions such as NFTicket and vehicle-to-grid tools. In 2023, it launched bloXmoveNG, its ride-hailing dApp in Nigeria. bloXmove joined the peaqosystem to build a Web3 version of an Uber-style ride-hailing service on peaq in Europe.
Brainstem is building a decentralized health and wellness ecosystem, allowing people to monetize the data collected by their wearables, such as fitness trackers, and receive a holistic wellness service focusing on sleep and mental health through its app. It joined the peaqosystem to decentralize the rewards mechanism driving its DePIN and use peaq as its layer-1 blockchain.
“Web3 has a lot to offer to the digital wellbeing industry, and with peaq, we are driving forward its adoption in the sector. Our next goal is to demonstrate the potential of open health and well-being data services as part of an eHealth ecosystem based on consented data crowdsourcing,”
— Michael Campbell, CTO at Brainstem Digital Health.
In 2023, Brainstem:
charge.xyz is building a DePIN of privately-owned electric vehicle chargers that people can open up to public use wherever they sit idle. It was incubated in EoT Labs, the software development and EoT incubator organization developing peaq as an open-source layer-1 blockchain, and was involved in the peer-to-peer charging demonstration at IAA MOBILITY in Munich.
ELOOP is a Vienna-based car-sharing service with a fleet of more than 200 Teslas, 100 of those brandishing their own unique peaq IDs. More than 20 Teslas in this fleet are tokenized, with token holders receiving a share in the revenues the vehicle makes on every ride. ELOOP joined peaq to decentralize the rewards mechanism behind these tokenized Teslas and expand its tokenization model to other industries and hardware.
“ELOOP is an ecosystem for the transformation of physical RWAs (real-world assets) into DePINs (decentralized physical infrastructure networks). We revolutionize the tokenization of physical, income-generating RWAs across the energy and mobility industries, and peaq enables us to build it on a solid Web3 backbone,”
— Leroy Hofer, CEO at ELOOP.
Number of Teslas: 200
Number of token holders: 2,000
ELOOP ONE token supply: 1,870,000 EOT (sold out)
Total real-world profit generated so far: €235,000
Number of trips of the tokenized Teslas in 2023: 10,000
Registered car sharing users: 100,000
MapMetrics is a DePIN built to rival Google Maps and other popular Web2 navigation apps. It enables anyone to earn rewards in crypto just for driving around with its locator device on and sharing the anonymized data it collects with the network. MapMetrics joined the peaqosystem to leverage peaq’s Modular DePIN Functions as it continues to grow and scale up.
“The DePIN model is the future of data-based services such as navigation as it gives people back the ownership of their data and geo-location privacy— we are excited to be developing this disruptive project on peaq,”
— Brent van der Heiden, Co-Founder and CEO at MapMetrics.
Number of devices: ~3,500
Present in countries: 73
Total app downloads: 5,000
Average daily km driven: 87,500
Average daily data in 2023: 500MB
In 2023, MapMetrics:
NATIX is building a platform of AI-imbued cameras collecting anonymized insights on street traffic and other valuable information. Its Drive& app for Android and iOS enables people to add their smartphones to its DePIN and collect insights on traffic, road condition, and more as they drive around their daily business. NATIX joined peaq to decentralize its rewards mechanism and push its vision of AI-driven data crowdsourcing further.
“We have already outpaced both Big Tech and other DePINs in our scaling, and are excited to further boost our network with peaq’s DePIN-specific stack.”
— Alireza Ghods, co-founder and CEO of NATIX.
Number of registered users: 40,000+
Average daily events counted in 2023: 179,000+
Total events collected in 2023: 46,000,000+
Number of countries with presence: 174
Total km mapped: 3,800,000+
In 2023, NATIX:
penomo is enabling green energy storage businesses to unlock more revenue streams by tokenizing their energy assets and sharing a part of the revenues they generate with the global community of Web3 investors. penomo joined the peaqocosystem to put the future of sustainable energy on a DePIN foundation.
"penomo is accelerating the deployment of sustainable energy, a core requirement for our sustainable future, through tokenization and DeFi, and peaq provides the ideal web3 infrastructure for us to make it possible."
— Jasvir Dhillon, co-founder and CEO of penomo.
LoIs signed: 4
LoIs with companies from: Germany, Norway, India
PoCs in the works: 3
Partnerships in the pipeline: 5
In 2023, penomo:
Silencio is a smartphone-based DePIN that rewards people and communities for measuring noise pollution around the world. It joined peaq to decentralize the rewards mechanism driving the growth of its DePIN and tap peaq’s Modular DePIN Functions to continue its development.
“The DePIN model is transforming the way we collect valuable data, taking the power away from corporations and empowering communities to be the driver for change. We’re thrilled to be spearheading this shift with peaq,”
— Thomas W. Messerer, co-founder and CEO of Silencio.
Total devices on the network: 44,200
Average data collected per daily: 6 million daily data points collected
Average daily measurements: 5,700 measurements daily
Daily minutes measures: 35,300 minutes measured
Number of Countries: 175 countries globally
Expected users by EOY 2024: 1,000,000 users globally
Total measured time: 30.66 years
Covered Area: 1.3 billion sq. m.
In 2023, Silencio:
Wicrypt is a DePIN enabling people to share and monetize their Internet connection. With its core team based in Africa, Wicrypt aims to help the world bridge the digital divide, with about ⅓ of the global population still lacking affordable Web access. It joined the peaqosystem to continue on with this mission, leveraging peaq’s DePIN-specific tools and economics.
“Connecting the unconnected is an important mission, and we are proud of the progress we have made on this journey so far — with peaq,” — Ugochukwu Aronu, CEO of Wicrypt.
Total hotspots: 1,250
Present in countries: 31
Active users: 48,724
Total Data over 2023: 643.9TB
Distributed Rewards over 2023: 3,199,590.91 $WNT
In 2023, Wicrypt:
WingBits is a DePIN aiming for the sky. It enables people to set up antennas to receive automated transmissions from airplanes for collecting valuable air-faring data and earn rewards. It joined peaq to tap into its Modular DePIN Functions and economics, enabling decentralized data collection and reward distribution.
“Flight data is a valuable asset for a wide range of actors, including rescue services, airlines, travel analytics, research groups, and flight enthusiasts. The DePIN model is perfect for its collection, and peaq is the perfect layer-1 to build this DePIN on,”
— Robin Wingardh, CEO at WingBits.
Total antennas: 240+
MoM growth: 380%
Countries covered: 52
Presence on 6 continents
Total data over 2023: 27 billion position updates (beta launch October 16th)
Daily position aircraft updates: over 550 million
In 2023, WingBits:
A look at the key developments and highlights on the enterprise side of the Economy of Things on peaq.
In 2023, peaq worked together with Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility moveID project, led by Bosch and including other top industry names such as Continental, Airbus, and DENSO, to co-shape the future of smart mobility.
peaq is one of the two layer-1 blockchain networks involved in the project, which aims to create the framework and infrastructure for a peer-to-peer, decentralized mobility paradigm. The EU-backed consortium involves other leading Web3 projects, including Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol, and has received more than €14 million from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, peaq’s Self-Sovereign Machine IDs are built to comply with its standards and frameworks, ensuring a smooth transition to wider EU compliance in the future.
Throughout the year, EoT Labs was actively involved in a variety of workflows within moveID, helping implement its protocols on peaq as a leading layer-1 network for decentralized mobility solutions. The process culminated in peaq taking part in the live moveID demo at IAA MOBILITY in Munich in September, where it showcased peer-to-peer parking and charging.
The live demo included two electric vehicles, a Tesla Model 3 and a Jaguar, sponsored respectively by htw saar and Bosch. The visitors could take a quick drive around the streets of the city as the demo team presented them a digital app where they could find a free parking spot and charger, register with them using the vehicle’s blockchain wallet, and pay for the charging session and their parking fee with tokens.
peaq worked as the layer-1 backbone enabling a lot of these interactions. All the connected infrastructure components, including the vehicles, the charging station, and the parking spot hardware, were outfitted with their unique on-chain peaq IDs, which enabled them to identify and transact with one another. peaq’s payment module — the peaq pay pallet — was used to facilitate the transactions between the devices, and the peer-to-peer charging software was also provided by peaq.
The live demo was successful with the visitors of the display, putting to work some of the core principles that both peaq and moveID deeply believe in. Leveraging peaq’s Modular DePIN Functions, it showcased all the key functions a peer-to-peer charging and parking service must bring to the table, enabling the vehicle to tap its own wallet to initiate a charging session and reserve a parking spot. The demo showed the potential of bringing mobility on Web3 rails and pushed the momentum forward under the auspices of moveID.
In December 2023, peaq unveiled another enterprise-facing project. Together with Bosch, the world’s largest sensor manufacturer, and Fetch.ai, a Web3 platform for the new AI economy, peaq showcased a project that turned the Bosch XDK device into a smart sensor hub capable of monetizing diverse valuable data cross a multitude of DePINs on peaq. The device got its own peaq ID and was running a Fetch.ai AI Agent, which enabled it to pick optimal DePINs for earning rewards for the owner.
The implementation set the example of a DePIN-agnostic device capable of generating value as part of multiple DePINs of up to 8 types, based on the sensors the device features. These are:
The project is a major step towards ushering in a new paradigm for data-crived services in a smart city environment, where anyone anywhere can become a provider of valuable data. From decentralized weather services to light and noise pollution gauges, the XDK device running an AI Agent can work within multiple DePINs on peaq, creating exponentially more value than a standalone sensor linked with a single DePIN.
Besides this important collaboration, 2023 also saw the KI2L project led by Fraunhofer HHI, part of the Fraunhofer society, Europe’s largest applied research organization, tap peaq as its layer-1 backbone. As part of the project, peaq is hosting the digital twins of lithium-ion batteries installed in electric vehicles. Researchers will use these digital twins to build predictive models to monitor batteries with maximum sustainability in mind. This project will enable an ecosystem of services and dApps around li-ion batteries on peaq while also helping the utilization of li-ion batteries, which are not the most eco-friendly product to produce.
A quick breakdown of peaq’s own stats, highlights, and key releases throughout the year.
As the Economy of Things continues to come together, its Web3 backbone, peaq, is growing its functionality and toolset to keep providing the best possible environment both for Web3-native teams building DePINs and real-world dApps and for Web2 companies and device manufacturers bracing for a dive into the Web3.
Throughout 2023, the peaq ecosystem has dramatically expanded to include 12 DePINs either choosing peaq as their layer-1 backbone or expanding some of their functionalities to peaq. Besides them, Kansi Solutions and Techtics Engineering joined the peaq ecosystem to support the builders through their respective solutions. DappLooker brought advanced analytics and visibility to peaq’s sister network krest, with peaq also slated to receive similar tools once it goes live, and Menthol Protocol set off to build a carbon offset platform for projects in the peaq ecosystem.
Overall, in the course of 2023, the network has seen immense traction alongside the following performance indicators:
The year also saw peaq expand the range of tools and utilities for projects building DePINs and real-world dApps on it as well as for the community. The year saw the following releases:
peaq is the home of DePIN, but there are exciting projects in other ecosystems too — meet some of them here.
As a layer-1 for real-world applications, peaq was built to power DePIN even before the term began to circulate around the Web3 space. As such, it is home to a wide range of promising DePIN projects, and is projected to account for about 20% of this Web3 segment at mainnet launch. But there are talented builders working on exciting DePIN use cases in other blockchain ecosystems too — and in this section, we will put some of them on your radar.
Chirp Network is a unified wireless network for the Internet of Things, mobile, and broadband providing decentralized connectivity to devices and people alike. It relies on a passionate global community of enthusiasts who set up Chirp’s custom multi-protocol gateways, creating a network for all-around connectivity for the Internet of Everything.
Chirp’s network is already providing coverage in 163 cities across 25 countries — a feat that would have taken a traditional telecom company significantly more time and resources to achieve. The community has so far deployed 226 devices, which produced 22,952,804 LoRaWaN packets in the last 30 days at the moment of the report’s writing. In 2024, the project is planning to release an innovative new miner for the community to set up, launch its global SIM and e-SIM cards, and release a mobile app, among other things. Connectivity is a promising DePIN use case, and it’s only fair that people get to own the bridges that connect them, which makes Chirp a project with a lot of vision and substance to itself.
Dabba is also focusing on connectivity, especially in emerging and developing nations, viewing equal and unobstructed Web access as a key tool enabling communities to flourish in the 21st century. Dabba provides the community a variety of hardware options, with two versions of its WiFi router available to those who want to share their connection and earn by providing connectivity.
More recently, the project unveiled Dabba Laser — an innovative device that sheds radio signals as its transmission method in favor of a laser beam transmitting data at an exponentially higher speed. The goal behind the device is to enable communities to link their routers together without any need for wires, building fast and efficient wireless networks across entire cities. According to the project, the device stays reliable even in harsh weather conditions. This desire to innovate is at the core of Dabba’s approach to building the networks that bring communities together, and it fuels its rise as the network continues to grow.
DIMO is a DePIN for drivers who want to help build a decentralized future of mobility while fuelling a massive mobility data ecosystem. It has released a mobile app for drivers that incorporates a variety of features, including vehicle diagnostics, keyless unlocking, and GPS privacy options. The app rewards users with $DIMO token while fueling DIMO’s privacy-first mobility data ecosystem.
With more than 10,000 installations on Google Play and an iOS release, DIMO brings together thousands of drivers around the world who earn rewards by sharing their vehicle data. The network includes almost 30,000 connected vehicles, including almost 7,500 Teslas, and its ecosystem is quickly expanding to include new apps and partners pushing the vision of a peer-to-peer mobility data platform further.
Wayru also puts the DePIN model to use in the name of connecting people and communities as it takes on the persistent plague of the digital divide — a bane of both developed and developing economies that sees the most vulnerable communities lacking access to the global Web. It enables people to share their Internet connection over WiFi and earn tokens for providing connectivity in a bid to cut into the last-mile delivery market and reduce communities’ dependency on traditional Internet Service Providers.
According to the project, the Wayru network currently includes more than 500 hotspots serving some 250,000 people across the globe. This in itself signifies traction, and as the project continues to grow, the innovation and competition it brings to the long-dormant industry is set to drive better conditions for users and trigger a wider paradigm shift for the entire telecom segment.
