Builder Updates
In the crypto world, 2022 will probably go down in the books as the 12 months that make Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding look like child’s play. True, most of the seasoned crypto aficionados have probably grown used to such drama at this point. In crypto winter, build snowmen, not strawmen, right? Well, not exactly, judging by the amount of damage caused by such dramatic events as Luna’s meltdown and FTX’s staggering fall-from-grace. The tokens may have been digital, but the tears were very much real.
At EOT LABS, we did what builders do when it snows outside: We fought off the temptation of snuggling under a warm blanket with a mug of hot chocolate and built, built, built. Goblin-mode grind or nothing, let’s go! The grind it was, and as we look back at the results, we can say for sure that the past year was when the party started for real. We set the foundation for many great things to come and got the ecosystem into position for further growth.
So what exactly has happened? Let’s go through peaq’s 2022 highlights month-by-month.
In January, we announced joining Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI), one of the largest blockchain consortia focusing on the mobility industry. The organization includes top carmakers, such as BMW, Ford, and General Motors, leading Internet of Things companies — think IBM and Hitachi — as well as a plethora of NGOs and Web3 projects.
Together, we are all working toward building a digital foundation for the mobility of the future where all of its moving parts (pun intended) will be able to interact with one another peer-to-peer, without going through Big Tech intermediaries. Imagine your electric vehicle connecting with a charging station all by itself, without forcing you to sign up with another app that will leech off your data, and paying for the session from its own wallet — that’s the kind of experience the consortium, and peaq, are shooting for.
Now, to do all of these cool things, devices will need to first identify one another. Which is why January also saw us roll out peaq ID, one of the core Modular DePIN Functions of the peaq network. With peaq ID, users can create Self-Sovereign Identities for their machines to enable them to communicate and transact with other machines through peaq’s decentralized infrastructure. peaq ID is a critical building block for everything else coming to the peaq network.
In February, we broke more great news: EOT LABS (then named peaq) won the 2021 Breakthrough Award in the e-Mobility category in a vote hosted by connect.de, part of the WEKA MEDIA PUBLISHING GmbH. Our approach to bridging the walled gardens of the electrical vehicle charging industry through Web3 tech vowed the users and secured a €300,000 marketing budget.
Also in February, we struck a partnership with our good frens at AllianceBlock, an end-to-end decentralized finance solutions provider. As you are about to see, this wide-reaching collaboration saw much growth throughout the year, including integrations and joint community events, and we are thrilled to be exploring it even further in 2023. As an example of the community-focused events to come, head here for the latest AMA with AllianceBlock, a strategic partner within the peaq ecosystem.
March saw the second of three core Modular DePIN Functions go live as we unveiled peaq access, a decentralized role-based access control tool for machines. The function enables people building on peaq to create the logic for role-based interactions between users and machines. To make it more simple, imagine a Web3 vending machine. You want a buyer — a default role for a new user using the machine — to be able to buy their snacks and drinks and whatnot, but not necessarily access its insides. A maintenance worker, for their part, which is a role requiring an extra identity check, will need to be able to open it up and restock it.
As handy and helpful as this function is, something even more exciting happened later on in March: Agung, our public testnet, went live, granting the peaq community access to peaq’s core features. Notably, Agung showcased a cool feature that you will see on all peaq networks, its support for both Solidity and ink! smart contracts. For the uninitiated, this may take some explanation (head here for a deep dive!), but the gist is, peaq is compatible with smart contracts for both Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Substrate. EVM is the world’s most popular smart contract execution environment, while Substrate is Polkadot’s native framework. This dual compatibility enables peaq to seamlessly integrate with the Polkadot ecosystem while also being immediately accessible to Ethereum devs.
Early in April, we shared a major pillar of peaq’s vision, unveiling plans to pursue a Polkadot parachain slot. If you’ve been around the Polkadot space, you know what’s up and can skip the next paragraph — or stick around for another helpful 101. Everyone else, strap in.
Polkadot uses a hub-and-spokes architecture, working as the layer-0 chain for a bunch of mission-specific layer-1 blockchain networks, or parachains. A blockchain of blockchains, if you will. This enables native interoperability within the Polkadot ecosystem, which is a crucial feature for the future of a multi-chain Web3. To be part of this ecosystem, though, a chain has to secure a parachain slot for itself in an auction. So far, so good? Great! If not, head here to learn more about this and find out why we’re gearing up for Polkadot.
Later on in the month, we also joined forces with Subsquid, an organization building a data backbone for the blockchain world. We kicked off by setting up a Subsquid Archive (a historical data repository) for the Substrate component of peaq. The integrations also bring Subsquid’s data indexing tools to developers building on peaq — a handy tool for those creating the decentralized Economy of Things.
Things got so exciting in June that we really feel like skipping May over, especially given what a slaughter the month was for the wider crypto space as the LUNAr eclipse sent shockwave after shockwave across markets, headlines, metaverses, and probably even multiverses. In times of FUD, we did the only thing left for us to do: tuned out of the market, rolled up those sleeves and built harder.
That’s not to say we just sat deaf and mum in our coding caves, though. We flexed that thought leadership muscle, with peaq’s co-founder Max Thake explaining how NFTs can give everyone a share in the automation of economy. Curious? Check out his feature piece on Forkast. Take your time, we’ll be talking a lot more about Machine NFTs in 2023 — and we won’t continue without you, we promise.
When there’s too much bad news everywhere, which for the crypto world was pretty much the entire 2022, good news travels fast. Thankfully, for us, June was quite generous on those.
It all started with our partnership with Atlas Technology Group, a Business-to-Protocol innovator, which opened up with Atlas joining our node operator community. With time, the collaboration will also involve various other integrations, from data storage to token staking, making Atlas our strategic supporter and infrastructure provider.
And then, it happened — after months of hard work, we were finally able to announce the closing of peaq’s latest funding round, worth $6 million and led by Fundamental Labs and backed by many other leading Web3 investors. We were honored and humbled to have their backing behind our vision, and we still are, making sure to put the coffers to work as we keep building the foundation for a Web3 Economy of Things and a more equitable economic equation for all. The announcement made a splash in the media, getting peaq featured in leading news portals as CoinDesk, Business Insider, and Yahoo Finance. Onwards and upwards!
The good thing about being a builder is you don’t choose between a Lambo and Tesla after closing your funding round, you just keep building. It’s kinda what you do when in doubt, and when not in doubt too, for that matter. To build or not to build is not a question.
And so, we built. The first thing we rolled out in July was peaq scan, an open-source blockchain explorer for the Polkadot ecosystem — the first one out there, if you pardon us this (and many other) humblebrags. The explorer fetches real-time blockchain data and displays it for the user in a clear and convenient way on a handy visual interface. It’s available on peaq’s GitHub, so go ahead and use it, fork it, improve it, go to town on it and please have a blast while you do.
Not tired of the word “builder” yet? Good, because in July, we also announced that peaq joined the Substrate Builders Program by Parity Technologies. The announcement rolled out as we hit the second milestone of this prestigious program by the masterminds behind Substrate. Parity’s vast support, including technological expertise, community activities, and networking, has been priceless so far, and we are sure it will yield many more great results in the coming year.
Remember MOBI, the mighty mobility-focused Web3 consortium including BMW, Renault, and all the other cool kids on the block? In August, we kept up our building streak and added the support for its Vehicle Identity standard to the peaq network. This gives builders on peaq another handy tool to incorporate into their decentralized applications to make them compliant with global standards.
In other news, August also saw the trinity of peaq’s core Modular DePIN Functions completed as we rolled out peaq pay, the peer-to-peer payments function for machines, vehicles, robots, devices, and everything in between. The function is pretty self-explanatory: If it’s an Economy of Things, someone has to be paying, right? With peaq pay, they can do just that.
Last but not the least, a group of students with the Technical University of Munich used the peaq network to build a prototype dApp for renting out parking spots. The dApp, built under supervision from fortiss, is now in open-source access on GitHub. It enables parking spot owners to earn on renting those off when not using them, all the while helping cities relieve some of the parking congestion problems.
In September, we worked on more releases and ecosystem expansions, starting with the Fundrs dApp integration, which came from our partnership with AllianceBlock. Fundrs is a decentralized peer-to-peer cross-chain funding platform based on reputation and merits. As the first ones to integrate with it within the Polkadot ecosystem, we enabled developers to leverage it for seeking support across the entire blockchain space, helping their projects grow and scale faster.
Also in September, we rolled out the first version of the peaq app, the community’s one-stop-shop hub for all things peaq tokens. The first release featured a bridge between the EVM and Substrate components of our testnet, with future updates slated to bring more functions, such as governance, earning, and voting on what machines should join the network next.
On an even more exciting note, September saw us announce our involvement in moveID, a project within the 4 Future Mobility family of the Gaia-X consortium. Led by Bosch, moveID brings together a starry line-up of manufacturers like Airbus, Denso, and Continental, alongside an array of leading Web3 projects to build the standards and infrastructure for decentralized machine identities.
Working with groups like MOBI and Gaia-X gives us a seat at the table where the details and technical standards for such are being hammered out. It also helps us get a better sense of what exactly the industry is looking for in the blockchain world and make sure that the peaq network delivers exactly that and more. And for those building on peaq, such collaborations mean that their projects will be immediately compatible with the machines and services built by top global companies.
In October, we rode the wave of the moveID big reveal to expand our collaborations with other project participants. With deltaDAO AG, a decentralized autonomous organization providing GDPR-compliant data economy solutions, we launched our Gaia-X Web3 ecosystem portal for monetizing data and algorithms. The partnership bolsters the data component of the Economy of Things, enabling peaq users to monetize the data collected by their machines on the decentralized Gaia-X marketplace.
We will also be working with Datarella GmbH, Web3 company builder and another moveID participant, beyond the scope of the project. Our partnership will focus on fleshing out various aspects of Self-Sovereign Machine Identities for the mobility space, as well as peer-to-peer transactions, decentralized marketplaces, and other Web3 tools for the industry.
In November, we expanded our ecosystem even further, teaming up with an array of exciting projects starting with OnFinality, a multi-chain blockchain infrastructure provider. Thanks to the integration, anyone will be able to launch a peaq node, hosted on a cloud service, in just a few clicks through the OnFinality Marketplace.
In another exciting development, we integrated with Crust Network, the Web3 data storage protocol. Thanks to the integration, the peaq community can store machine data on the decentralized Interplanetary File System through Crust. The peaq storage pallet leveraging Crust’s protocol is up on our GitHub at this link, make sure to check it out if you’re a coder.
On the heels of our moveID participation, we also announced our partnership with Ocean Protocol, the Web3 platform to unlock data services for AI and business innovation. This collaboration also aims at the data sector of the Economy of Things on peaq, enabling communities of machine-owners to monetize the data their machines generate by the day through Ocean’s decentralized data marketplace.
Wrapping up the month was yet another ecosystem expansion, with The Airwaive Project, a blockchain-based decentralized wireless broadband platform, joining the peaq community. Airwaive works to bring broadband Internet access to communities in the developing nations, and peaq’s Machine DeFi mechanisms will help its users fundraise to cover the upfront costs of setting up the networking hardware.
As if that’s not enough, November also saw us roll out our Ecosystem Grant Program, meant to support developers building on peaq. If your project is in need of a boost and could use some investor intros, don’t hesitate one bit, head here and apply now.
Wrapping up the year is perhaps our most important announcement so far: We unveiled krest, peaq’s canary network on Polkadot’s Kusama. krest will be the simulation playground for the Economy of Things, the place where the peaq community will be able to come to run their decentralized applications on a production-grade chain with real-world IoT devices and real economic scarcity.
Community members will be able to connect their devices, such as Raspberry Pi mini-computers, to krest and earn rewards for this and other actions on the networks. Developers building peaq will leverage these devices to simulate the behavior of various machines, such as vehicles or drones, and test the business logic of their dApps without the threat of causing real-world harm.
So this is it, this is our year in review — and so many things got left out! But what can you do, this already reads like a novel. There’s more cool stuff to come in 2023, so stay tuned and make sure to follow us everywhere to not miss the next transmission. In the meantime, we’re all wishing you the happiest of new years, with all the gains, tendies, and Moon-bound rocketships your heart desires!
We’re hiring across the board, from engineering to communications. Start the new year with a new job and build the Economy of Things with us.
Are you interested in building a dApp for vehicles, robots, devices and other machines? Get inspired, get funded, and start building today.
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