6/5/2024

Are mushrooms cool?

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Peaq and Krest are apart of a DePIN-focussed infrastructure. Krest runs on Kusama and is where projects can experiment before going onto Peaq, which is the main chain. In some cases, projects will choose to stay on Krest.

Peaq currently runs at 10,000 tps with theorectical ceiling of 100,000, the tx cost is reported to be $0.00025. Running on Polkadot it also has a partnership with Wormhole to help connect with the many other blockchains out there.

Also, to clarify, peaq like to spell peaq in lowercase. That is the rule.

In Leonard Dorlöchter’s own words - “McDonald’s recently revealed it was experimenting with AI-powered assistant machines for the drive-through services. The project is for now in its pilot, but let’s say it takes off. Then, in a few years, these cool machines would have created a few jobs for maintenance engineers — and wiped out hundreds of jobs for actual human assistants.

“In other words, the AI boom we see today is exacerbating a process that had already been gaining pace with automation of manual labor. As machines — things, as you might also call them — grow smarter, they can take over more and more functions and produce more and more value, both for humans and for other machines. The revenues from this go to the few while denying the many a chance to put food on the table. But while there’s no turning back on automation, it does not have to follow the ruthless logic of centralization of power and value. It can still go another way — peaq’s way.

“peaq’s mission is to power the Economy of Things, a system of economic relations where automation creates more and more value, but its boons are shared in a more equitable manner. The network enables such things as fractionalized ownership over fleets of connected machines and infrastructure hardware, which allows everyone to have their stake in the connected devices serving their needs. Think of it as a transition from corporations to communities of co-owners who have a piece in the ever-growing pie that automation is already cooking.

“krest, for its part, is peaq’s canary chain, the live-fast-die-young production-grade environment where builders come to test their dApps and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs) with real-world connectivity, but without the risk of real-world harm. Think of it as the stage where builders do their grand rehearsals before the premiere, which takes place on the peaq mainnet.”

Norway has done it again.

They hit a massive jackpot with the gas and oil along the Norwegian continental shelf. Oil and gas is usually found in authoritarian and inequal societies but here is Norway. A country that has a small population and despite its size it has a tiny amount of arable land. The mountains and fjords leads to tiny pockets of populace dotted about the Scandinavian land mass and it led to a sort-of-decentralised society where they all hand to trust one another for the greater good of making the most out of their resources, which was mainly fishing and making use of hydro-power.

Then they discovered their bountiful gas and oil and remarkably didn’t bloody ruin the spoils of this. They eventually put the money from the dead dinosaur fuel into a sovereign wealth fund that is worth $1.548tn. Norway, the population of 5.5 million, held 1.5% of the whole world’s listed companies. We haven’t seen numbers like that since Genghis Khan.

Here is the done it again part.

They discovered an absolute mind-******* **** ****tonne of phosphate in Norway.

Ten years ago, there were articles alarming that we desperately need to find more phosphorus, you cannot substitute phosporus and the source? Dead sea creatures from 10 millions years ago. Has anyone got a spare 10 millions years to wait?

There are little deposits of it dotted in China, Australia, Egypt and such however, 71% of the worlds supply was in Morocco. UNTIL the Norwegians stepped up and thought, “shall we tell them?” and announced to the world that, “HELLO! NORWAY HERE, SORRY WE HAVE TO SHOUT OVER THE SOUND OF HOW MUCH MONEY WE ARE MAKING. WE HAVE JUST DISCOVERED 70 BILLION TONNES OF PHOSPHORUS! NO, I AM NOT MESSING WITH YOU. YES, I KNOW THE WORLD SUPPLY IS 71 BILLION TONNES, CONSIDER IT DOUBLED!”

They discovered the equivalent of the known world’s supply of phosphorus under their feet. I love you Norway, I love how you do things, genuinely happy for you. Show us how to make the most of it.

The EU then went, “Oh brilliant” like a cousin who finds out you won the lottery and is suddenly camping on your front lawn. Norway is given privileges whilst not being in the EU. With the tensions in this world becoming multi-polar and Europe is relatively natural resource poor when compared to other continents, Norway is going to make so much money from its neighbours.

On top of that they have remittance from Erling Haaland’s goal bonus.

There appears to be an attempt to make the world Post-America, we are going to have various centres of power and it is quite tumultuous. Too high of a concentration of semiconductors are in Taiwan, an island China wants to bring back into the fold. America and China are decoupling, China has most of the critical raw materials. Russia is providing an alternative international payment system to SWIFT. BRICs is gaining momentum. The Middle East. AI. Rich people getting richer. Poor people are screwed. It is all a bit much.

The EU is trying to push back against external encroachment. The EU is a huge, albeit complicated, force and the US has attempted to dominate its infrastructure, one of them is the cloud infrastructure. The usual suspects were setting up data centres and veins across Europe; AWS, Google, and Microsoft all placing roots in the appendix called Europe.

The digital sovereignty was slipping away from Europe and they needed to think up something in response. The French raised a white flag but the Germans ushered France to lower the flag, “Not this time.” The top French heads and German minds sat down and decided to initiate a project to help provide a European data infrastructure made by Europeans. A federated secure data infrastructure as the US and China have different values when it comes to data privacy, transparency, storage, and security.

This led to an international non-profit organization based in Belgium called Gaia-X. Gaia-X was announced at the Digital Summit 2019 in Dortmund and this signalled a new era for European data. It involved French and German governments along with over 300 organisations that are large corporations and SMEs.

The French founding members were:OrangeAmadeusEDFIMTScalewaySafranDocaposteOVHcloudOutscaleATOS

The founding members from the German side were:SAP Beckhoff Automation BMW DE-CIXGerman Edge Cloud PlusServer Siemens Deustche Telekom Bosch

CISPE, IDSA, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.

These are some big players. SAP, depending on the year, is often in the top 5 SaaS companies. OVHcloud is the largest hosting provider in Europe, 3rd largest in the world, it has the largest data centre based on surface area. ATOS are massive in cybersecurity and cloud computing, they have a big contracts with large companies such as Coca-Cola, utilising AI and IoT. I can go more into each company but we will be here all day.

Scaleaway left the project. It is worth nothing why they departed. Scaleaway believed in the objectives of Gaia-X to protect European interests in the Euro infrastructure of cloud and big tech. However, as the project progressed, Scaleaway noted that the German counterparts and French consumers of big tech wanted to keep US big tech involved. Scaleaway felt this was an asymmetrical relationship and US does not grant these privileges to EU firms and it was going back on the original principles of the Gaia-X initiative.

Having industrial leaders from Germany and France was always going to lead to a clash of opinions but Gaia-X, in the long term, interconnection and network providers can provide end-to-end services across multiple networks in a federated, dedicated GAIA-X communication infrastructure.

One particular company to focus on here is Bosch. A business institute from Germany, it provides devices and services in engineering and for tech companies around the world. They are the world's largest sensor manufacturer and one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers. Bosch employs over 400,000 people worldwide and is a global player in multiple industries including mobility, consumer goods, industrial technology and energy and building technology.

At 12:53pm, July 20th, 2015, Bosch announced on Twitter they were launching the Bosch Global Service Solutions division - twitter.com/boschglobal/status/626722360415121408 – stating, “Bosch sets up new division "Bosch Global Service Solutions": huge growth potential with connected services #IoT”

The division “offers outsourcing for business processes and services, primarily for customers in the automotive, travel, and logistics industries and in information and communications technology”.

IoT references to the Internet-of-Things, in brief, it is devices (things) connecting on a network, transmitting data.

A reason to jump into IoT is down to Bosch wanting to be a standard-setter, it wasn’t an overnight decision, Bosch has been playing with IoT since 2008. With that announcement, it went hand in hand with the goal to be a the leading IoT provider by 2025. To do so they have pivoted from being a manufacturing, service-orientated company to an IoT company as of 2016.

Setting the standards within IoT has a huge upside for Bosch. According to a McKinsey 2015 report, the upside could be $11tn for IoT across 9 sectors.

Move into 2021, McKinsey reviewed IoT once again and believed the acceleration towards it was faster than they had anticipated. stating, “By 2030, we estimate that it could enable $5.5 trillion to $12.6 trillion in value globally, including the value captured by consumers and customers of IoT products and services.” Vehicles was highlighted to have $430bn – 620bn in IoT value.

They further highlight, “autonomous vehicles (which include partial-driving automation, or level-two autonomy, and up) make up the fastest-growing IoT-value cluster. Its expected CAGR between 2020 and 2030 is 37 percent (to $0.3 trillion in 2030, from $0.01 trillion in 2020) in the high-end scenario.”

Their 2021 report also says, “Networks act as the backbone that bring the IoT to life and make it all possible. Telecom companies’ fourth-generation (4G) networks have spread to cover more people at higher performance, and 5G networks are rapidly being deployed.”

On quick digression, if you want to read the “5G IoT Global Market Report 2023” by McKinsey, it costs $4,800.

With 5G adoption comes latency is as low as 1ms, more bits per Hz, multi-gbps peak rates, radical optimisation of network efficiency, and more hyper-densification. IBM have reported autonomous cars could collect more than 1 terabyte of data a day. 5g latency helps cars “see” further as they can connect with any individual built-in device in the area as the low band to high band frequencies covers hundreds of square miles.

It is not just autonomous cars, this impacts sectors such as AR, AI, agriculture, healthcare, energy, supply chains, logistics. McKinsey predict 60% of the world population will be covered by 5G. This is not just a significant advancement for IoT, as mobile and internet connectivity expands across the world, more people can onboard financially, as is often the touted objective of the BIS, WEF, WB, etc.

To bring it back to cars, they need a lot of sensors and go through a lot of data. A Tesla vehicle is equipped with 8 external cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors and an onboard computer. It has an autopilot feature, it can park itself, it receives satellite data but also camera data, it has patches to safety and it can communicate with other cars on the network.

In 2014, Tesla were able to fix 30,000 cars with a software update as a fault in one car was detected and the solution was applied to other cars, this was due to the innovation that is IoT.

Elon Musk said in an interview that Tesla will have a “ChatGPT moment”, his quote being, “"Tesla will have sort of a ChatGPT moment, maybe if not this year, I'd say no later than next year… "Three million cars will drive themselves with no one. And then 5 million cars and then 10 million cars."

Near the end of 2022, Musk said “to solve full self-driving, you actually have to solve real-world artificial intelligence, which nobody has solved.”

“The whole road system is made for biological neural nets and eyes. …In order to solve for full self-driving, we have to solve neural nets and cameras to a degree of capability that is on par with or really exceeds humans.”

“And I think we will achieve that this year,” Musk said.

Tesla have released the FSD system (Full Self Driving) and thought it has autonomous features but this is not technically autonomous, it requires the driver to still be vigilant and have their hands on the steering wheel.

The EU-funded Gaia-X has a project called MoveID, which is led by Bosch, and it presented this at the IAA show 2023 - “Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung” a.k.a International Motor Show. There was a demonstration with Tesla and Jaguar EVs autonomous transactions between connected devices and how they streamline expenses and add new revenue streams. This is a decentralised mobility system.

With leveraging blockchain, through the use of SSI (Self-Sovereign IDs) connect vehicles to infrastructure and generate value.

Here are the companies involved:TeslaJaguarDeltaDao AG - www.delta-dao.com/ They partner with AirBus, Ocean Protocol, Oasis Network, Dione-X, Dutch Blockchain Coaltion, Polygon, Membrane Finance, Gaia-X and more. They help monetise AI and data as well as consult companies on being Gaia-X compliant. The co-founder, Kai Meinke, is also the lead of Gaia-X Open-Source Software Community.Denso - www.denso.com/de/en/business/business-field/ A Japanese business that has gained independence from Toyota, its name means “Electric Device”. Denso MaaS is their IoT cloud-based tech, they provide AI, safety, parts, they will be crucial in supporting and providing parts for the infrastructure needed. It is a huge organisation.

Datarella - datarella.com/ A Web 3 company centred on building other projects for autonomous connection. They utilise tech partnerships with Ethereum, Hyperledger, Cosmos, Arweave, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol. Its partners are Bosch, BMW, Daimler, ESA, Otto Group, Max Plank, ID Union, World Food Programme, along with ties EU and UK government funding initiatives.

Ocean Protocol - oceanprotocol.com This helps bridge data silos and tokenise the AI and data. A Decentralised data-sharing protocol.

Fetch.ai - https://fetch.ai/ a protocol to connect AI agents as well as help build and deploy them, they raised $62mm across 4 funding rounds. The Fetch.ai Foundation was started by Fetch and Bosch.

51 nodes - www.51nodes.io/en/ Help develop blockchain innovations and integrations. Involved with SSI and Technical design, full-stack software, blockchain development, hardware and systems integration, ecosystem, and venture management. Below is their network:

htw saar - fgvt.htwsaar.de/site/en/ A key research group with European funding, focussed on information and communication architectures.

Materna - www.materna.com/EN/About-us/Our-Partners/our-partners_node.html A strong big tech partnership network, Materna have significant clients where they apply IT solutions. Owned by two private founding families.

Continental - www.continental.com/en/ Global provider of automotive technologies.

Wobcom - www.wobcom.de/ueber-uns/ Wolfsburg based internet, telecom provider.

Esec - www.ecsec.de/ueber-ecsec/  Involved with chip cards, electronic signatures, identity management, and internet security.

ATOS - atos.net/en-gb/united-kingdom French big cloud, big data company.

Chainstep - chainstep.com/ End to end partner for deep tech.

Zeppelin University – AyeAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Bigchain - www.bigchaindb.com/about/ Partnered with the likes of Porsche, Polkadot, Toyota, allowing large applications to utilise data, harness data marketplaces, and provide solutions.

ITK - https://www.itk-engineering.de/ A digital engineering firm that focusses on mobility, healthcare, and industry.

DLR - https://www.dlr.de/de/das-dlr/ueber-uns The German Federal Space Agency.

Of course Bosch and then there is peaq…

The EU favours Polkadot and in June 2023, Stasis announced they would be the largest euro-backed stablecoin on the market and it is launching on Polkadot. Deloitte has integrated KILT to help with KYC, KILT is a parachain of Polkadot. Deutsche Telecom have a validator spot on Polkadot, peaq is built on Dot. This is all after the EU Commission looked into Polkadot as a part of the #DLT4Good project.

Peaq Network is built on top of Polkadot and peaq co-founder Leonard Dorlochter spoke about the project at Polkadot’s Decoded conference last year and the marketing stresses the use of Tesla’s. On Polkadot’s twitter they posted the fact there was a peaq branded Tesla outside the conference (twitter.com/Polkadot/status/1674070193016823809). If you do search for peaq or listen to interviews/talks in the first few minutes, if not seconds, there is a mention of electric vehicles and Tesla.

If you follow this link you will see from Max Thake (peaq CEO) write about the concept of Universal Basic Ownership (UBO) - maxthake.medium.com/universal-basic-ownership-ubo-fe449056c8a1

Within the article he quotes Elon Musk. May seem like nothing, Leonard Dorlochter quotes Confucius in this LinkedIn post, doesn’t mean he knows the guy. He also name drops Elon Musk - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leonarddorloechter_confucius-once-said-a-healthy-man-wants-activity-7018154404700659712-aFwH/

This is business and there are subtleties and nuances. The quotes and name drops are a hint.

In 2021, peaq came first in an eMobility breakthrough award - www.connect.de/news/breaktrough-award-2021-sieger-connect-3202032.html - and they received 300,000 euros in media services. The same year, the peaq twitter page posted this:

Here is a map of Berlin with the Tesla locations, it shows the supercharger, the stores and the giga factory:

Here is peaq Berlin HQ, also known as EoT Labs HQ, Kurfürstendamm 11, 10719 Berlin, Germany:

Again, what’s the big deal? We have a quotation from Elon Musk in an early blog post from the CEO of peaq, they tweet about visiting their neighbour’s gigafactory and @ them in the tweet on their official twitter page the same year they win a breakthrough award on emobility.

Being in the same city as a major business can be a coincidence, after all, Berlin is Germany’s start-up capital and it only has the highest density of research institutes in Europe, and many of these have a particularly high degree of competence in the fields of energy storage and manufacturing technologies.

I have already highlighted the fact that Tesla have cars on Eloop, which is on peaq. What I am alluding to here is the co-operation between peaq and Tesla may even predate peaqs official founding. That is speculation and dot-joining, there are other car manufacturers looking towards EoT such as Audi and Jaguar.

The team of peaq began working in 2018 and have been working with industry leaders on DID since 2019. Also in 2019, Tesla announced they would open a gigafactory in Berlin and the intention was to release the Y Model in 2021 through the factory. The factory was officially opened in March 2022.

At Decoded 2023, Leonard said, “as vehicles, robots and devices on land, at sea, in the sky or EVEN IN SPACE…” he stresses the space part and Musk is known for sending unmonitored satellites into space.

Having said that, peaq do also have with the German Space Agency - the DLR - who worked with Space X in 2021 to send a European astronaut to the ISS. A year later, SpaceX assisted with launching special environmental satellite ENMAP – the abbreviation stands for Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program. The DLR receive data from the ENMAP satellite and this is processed within by the  German Remote Sensing Data Center (Deutsches Fernerkundungsdatenzentrum; DFD) and the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (Institut für Methodik der Fernerkundung; IMF).

2023, SpaceX helped the ESA ship Swedish astronaut named Marcus Wandt to the ISS. More recently, NASA and DLR confirmed another joint mission to monitor climate change, something I will come back to later.

In case you have just come back from living in the Amazon for a couple of decades, Tesla is a company that has been building EV cars from the ground up, with supply chain management from resource to final product. Tesla makes use of its megapacks and will receive vast amounts of venture from energy storage. They will release virtual power plants and customers can make earnings from providing energy for the grid.

Tesla has been training its D1 AI chip since 2021 and they are still making use of Nvidia hardware. This aids Tesla’s FSD, the semi-autonomous driving feature for their cars. The cars have been fed billions of miles and hours of footage from the best drivers. Musk said in 2023 that Tesla could have a Chat GPT moment whereby a handful of self-driving Tesla’s can expand to 3 million, then 5 million, then that doubles and so on.

When you have a self-driving car that may be sat at home this can be utilised as a taxi. Tesla will get a share of the fare and bear this in mind, Tesla made $96.77bn in revenue last year whilst Uber made$37.28bn in revenue, if Tesla have their GPT moment and self-driving robotaxi’s proliferate that is going to bring in a huge amounts of revenue.

Recently, Tesla showcased their robotaxi app and its functions plus Musk is christening the service CyberCab. There is an estimation that by 2030 there will be 116 million EVs globally and Tesla is striving to set the standard. E-Loop shared the stage with peaq when it was announced Tesla is coming to Polkadot as E-Loop in June 2023 tokenised 100 Tesla’s in Vienna, users to own a fraction of the fleet and share the revenue the cars generate from daily rideshare operations.

In 2014, Tesla gave away its IP to help stimulate EV growth as may car manufacturers, in spite of their massive manufacturing capabilities, hardly produced any zero-emission cars.

This means Tesla are so far ahead of their competitors they have the initiative on establishing the standards for charging stations. From 2012, Tesla have been creating a network of Supercharger stations for their vehicles. Tesla in 2021/2022 announced the North American Charging Standard (NACS) and its competitor was CCS standard used by any other EV. Aforementioned, Tesla were and still are producing vast amounts of EVs compared to many of their competitors and by 2024 Ford, Mercedes, Nissan, Honda/Acura, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, Toyota, Lexus, Rolls Royce, Mini and Jaguar plus a couple of others have adopted the NACS standard.

Here is a map of Tesla Superchargers:

There are over 45,000 Tesla Superchargers worldwide, 12,000 of them are in North America. This network is bigger than all competitors combined.

Most EV charging happens at home, a stark benefit over our conventional fuel combustion engine, but this means the electrical grid needs to be taken into consideration. There are multiple papers that discuss how to manage stress on the electrical grid with the advent of EVs becoming more popular. Couple that with a fragmented network of charging ports and this becomes a complicated issue.

However, a way to get around this is having smart charging spots, peer-to-peer charging and utilising blockchain for SSIs (Self-Sovereign Identities).

In the Economy-of-Things, machines and devices will need to have SSIs to interact with one another and identify what they are sharing data with. To quote peaqs github, “The peaq DID standard supports machines to discover each other, carry out transactions, verify claims, preserve privacy and remain sovereign.”

Machines need to be identified, authenticated and its credentials verified. In 2023, Gaia-X showcased MoveID at IAA Mobility where a Tesla and Jaguar were on show, to stamp the new era of mobility in Europe. Having a blockchain around this can also help incentivise people to go to less popular charging ports, it helps efficiently data share, provide SSIs, reduce fraud and provide other opportunities for different companies to get involved and that is peaq.

So far, I have highlighted the Gaia movement, Bosch, the optimism of IoT to the economy and Tesla. These are significant forces that should highlight that peaq is involved with market leaders and standard setters. As cities become “smarter”, there will be a dramatic rise in IoT dapps and peaq is geared for the IoT/RWA market.

It has a high decentralisation score with the Nakamoto Coefficient score being 90 and it does 10,000tps with the potential to beat 100,000tps. The block times are 6 seconds and the theory is it can get to 0.25 seconds. EVM and Rust compatible smart contracts with tx costs of $0.00025.

The ecosystem is growing with partnerships being announced regularly, here is to name a few of them - www.peaq.network/ecosystem-page :

Menthol Protocol – a multisided platform offering a one-stop solution to automate companies' and individuals' sustainability goals, with transparent, verifiable, automated, and customer-engaging climate action together with marketing tools. | www.mentholprotocol.com

BloXmove – web3 provider for a worldwide decentralized and collaborative mobility alliance alongside an efficient green energy reality | bloxmove.com/ | www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bloxmove-token

Ator - anonymous-routing ecosystem for a private internet | www.ator.io | coinmarketcap.com/currencies/airtor-protocol/

Wicrypt - decentralised internet access network | wicrypt.com/

Akreen Network - Web3-powered infrastructure for globally-distributed renewable energy resources connection and monetization to enable carbon-reduction application | arkreen.com

Aydo - DePIN of smart homes, think AirBNBs and rental agreements | aydo.ai/

E-Loop Network – tokenise shared vehicles | eloop.network/

Silencio – a decentralised network for noise pollution data | www.silencio.network

Acurast – decentralised GPUs for Depin | acurast.com

Xmaquina - DePIN of tokenized autonomous robots | www.xmaquina.io

Penomo – “tokenize real world physical infrastructure, especially renewable energy assets like PV units, storage batteries, wind farms and more” | penomo.io

Natix Network – mapping network | www.natix.network

Map Metrics – navigation map built entirely by the community for the community| mapmetrics.org/

Farmsent - blockchain platform connecting farmers with buyers, promoting food security and prioritizing small farmers. | www.farmsent.io/ | coinmarketcap.com/currencies/farmsent/

Charge – peer-to-peer charging | www.charge.xyz/

dTelecom – for your decentralised telecom needs | dtelecom.org/

Brainstem - scalable decentralized platform for collecting health data from wearable devices | brainstem.health/

2Blox - a DePIN of AI-powered cameras for counting vehicles on the roads | twitter.com/2bloxaway

Wingbits – flight tracking network | wingbits.com/

EC3 - Distributed Energy Storage | www.ec-cube.io/

Airwaive – depin wireless networks | www.airwaive.org

PowerPod - a shared EV charging network | www.powerpod.pro/

Wayru – decentralised wireless network | www.wayru.io/

Some of these projects would have been tested on Krest and future projects too will go through the Krest simulation.

Krest is tester chain for peaq, think Kusama to Polkadot, in fact Krest runs on Kusama. Having a canary network that is separate from the peaq network allows an opportunity for experimentation and if there is an error it is then separate away from peaq. So far, it is the only simulation chain for DePin projects, a zone to work out smart contract functions, try new consensus mechanisms and governance models.

Krest is already available to buy/sell - www.coingecko.com/en/coins/krest - and at the time of writing holding 2000+ Krest and putting it into a custodial wallet will make you eligible for the peaq airdrop. There is an another phase to the airdrop whereby if you apply a KREST/PEAQ liquidity pool you can get up to 4x the peaq airdrop, do see here for details - www.peaq.network/blog/peaq-airdrop-for-krest-holders-how-to-double-your-rewards

The first phase of the airdrop has $1,000,000 peaq tokens applied to it, the second phase as $2,000,000 peaq token. At the time of writing, in a community call, peaq is pencilled in to go live in 2 to 3 months time. If you are reading this in the future, firstly, how is the weather? Secondly, it may be too late for this.

Nexera (Alliance Block) were helping peaq and Krest launch as these chains were due to integrate Alliance Blocks mNFT however, all the links to articles on this are now broken so I am unsure what has happened here. I know the partnership was still there in 2023, I am unsure what is happening with the mNFT. www.linkedin.com/posts/peaq-network_technology-eot-future-activity-7021055700835442689-Gu5I/?originalSubdomain=mt

I will take this opportunity to look at the funding behind peaq/Krest.

It is always wise to check the funding and backgrounds of people behind a team as if can raise green flags and red flags. I will not name the project, a while ago I found they lost a lot of people’s Ethereum in their project therefore I mentioned to the group at the time not to invest in that particular teams new project. Fortunately, I do not have such concerns when checking behind peaq’s curtains.

A key company to look into when you are researching peaq is Advanced Blockchain. They are the first and oldest exchange-traded company on the Frankfurt stock exchange specializing in blockchain technology, offering their investors early-stage deal flows. January 2017 is when the company went public on the Düsseldorf Stock Exchange. Being listed on FWB means the company has to uphold stringent regulations, this helps their reputation amongst their multi-billion-dollar clients. It is a forward-looking company that is seeking to improve the VC flow in Berlin, Europe and beyond.

Here is a link to their portfolio - www.advancedblockchain.com/portfolio. They were in a private sale of Celestia, Energy Web Foundation (EWT), Neon Labs, Moxy, Fragnova, SDGx, Fractal ID, Manta Network, and Mero, they were in the private round of Polymer as well as the seed round.

AB was in the pre-seed for Polkadot in 2017 and managed about $100,000 a month from staking, the realised profit was $4.5 million. For Arweave, AB were in a Series A round plus they have a particular fund dedicated to the Arweave ecosystem, this is the Permanent Ventures fund established in 2021.

The seed rounds AB have been involved in are Near Protocol, Obol, Alluo, Contango, Maverick, Forest Park, Myso Finance, Sentinel dVPN, Talisman (Polkadot wallet), Apricot Finance, zCloak Network, Sigma Dex, and Trac Bloc.

Projects that have been incubated include Stela Labs, Quasar (exit 2022, ), Instrumental Finance, Warp Finance, Pendulum, Panoptic, Composable Finance and EoT Labs/peaq.

They acquired Nakamo.to and Finpro.

This is a map of the company structure -

Here is a video from 2017 with then AB CEO Michael Geike discussing peaq - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vke4jZQAnbc. Advanced Blockchain is the publicly listed company whereas the Nakamo.to falls under its umbrella, it hosts the tech brains and investors for Web 3 projects. Robert Küfner appears in this video with Michael Geike and Robert at the time was the CEO of Nakamo.to.

Küfner was an early miner of Bitcoin, in 2013 he started Smart Equity AG with Michael Geike, companies such as Deutsche Börse AG were speaking with Robert. In 2014 he became an investor of Ethereum, this is perhaps the where Polkadot and peaq’s relationship has its roots. Gavin was in Kreuzberg when he was programming what would be Ethereum. Robert spoke with Gavin Wood and was hooked, he invested in the Ethereum crowdsale and with his early crypto success of being involved with Bitcoin mining he was involved in the seed sales to many ICOs.

He went on to start Nakamo.to after meeting Till Wendler and Florian Reike at a Berlin Bitcoin gathering in 2017.

He had an interview in 2017 where he spoke of IOTA and its use of Tangle, “The tangle underlying IOTA is quantum-resistant and infinitely scalable. Mining, the waste of energy in bitcoin, is becoming obsolete. I am aware of a large corporation that is switching to the tangle due to the huge benefits over Ethereum transaction fees.”

He was particularly confident of Berlin being a crypto-centre, “Berlin is much cooler for the big names in the industry. Germany has the opportunity to become a leader in distributed ledger technology. Berlin is capital of crypto.”

Here is the link to that interview, he also brings up Ocean Protocol briefly, a partner of peaq – norbertgehrke.medium.com/blockchain-is-outdated-b1578e37e5a8

He does have some good reason for the confidence, in 2018 Porche became the first car manufacturer to implement a blockchain application. This was done using a complex machine learning network to enable a four-door sedan Porsche Panamera to act as the software client independently of backend database support. XAIN was the Berlin-based company that implemented it, they are now known as XAYN. This at the time ran on Ethereum and the team at AB sought to move towards alternatives such as DAG.

The Fraunhofer Society made a partnership with peaq in 2023. Fraunhofer is the largest research group in Europe with a yearly budget of €3 billion and they are starting up a DePin project on peaq. This project ties in with Fraunhofer’s KI2L project. The KI2L project is leveraging AI to make lithium-ion batteries more sustainable, it runs from 2023 to 2026. Jasvir Dhillon was the lead for KI2L at EoT Labs where Fraunhofer have established a partnership leading to penomo to be founded by Dhillon (they don’t like to capitalise their p’s in Berlin).

Allow me to go back to Mr Küfner in 2017. He shared an apartment with Wendler and Reike to set up Nakamo.to and in the same year Nakamo.to became a part of Advanced Blockchain AG, with CEO Michael Geike and Küfner became Chief Visionary Officer. As the years went by Nakamo.to essentially has absorbed into AB.

Advanced Blockchain was co-founded by Geike, Till Wendler, Florian Reike, and Robert Küfner.

Life is fluid and things move on, over time the team has had some changes. Reike is on the advisory board and so too is Küfner. Geike has gone onto 21 Oaks Capital, where peaq’s Leonard is an advisor. To take Geike’s place as CEO is Simon Telian who held the CIO position as well as be a Managing Director at Nakamo.to. Telian had a presentation at Deutsche Börse Cash Market Equity Forum and this attracted the attention of Klaus Rainer Kirchhoff, who runs Kirchhoff Consult AG. Klaus became an advisor for AB and brings is experience with him, “he has successfully guided 72 companies through IPOs and collaborated with prominent DAX-listed companies, the German government, and various other organizations.” (www.advancedblockchain.com/blogs/klaus-rainer-kirchhoff-joins-advanced-blockchain-as-an-advisor-and-investor)

Olav Sorenson is on the supervisory board and is another who has a intellectual weight and experience to help advise, after all he is a scholar of entrepreneurship, he was even awarded the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research for his work. He mainly works at UCLA Anderson School of Management.

One of the original Ethereum engineers, Marek Kotewicz, is an advisor to AB and he has also worked on Polkadot, further increasing the connection between the two organisations. Dr Marcel Tyrell is a fellow advisor, he has a PhD in Banking and Finance.

A useful ally to have on the advisory board is Håkan Saltin. He is the CTO and co-founder of Radtonics, which provides edge computing and 5G networks for autonomous transport. Sebastian Markowsky is an advisor helping AB with investing in new business areas and recently he joined Capitalmind Investec.

Chairman of these splendid supervisors is Rüdiger A. Günther, a German business veteran whose most notable achievement is getting CFO of the year whilst at CLAAS. CLAAS is a German manufacturer in agricultural machinery, he got revenues up to near 5 billion euros.

One character I was slightly confused at is David Kaplan, according to the AB website he is the General Counsel but checking his own Linked In he left AB in 2022. He works at Horizon Law, which deals with Web 3, this may lead to some dealings between the two companies in the future.

An important figure of AB’s history is Richard Malone, who had a background in cybersecurity and digital investments. He helped lead 15 investments for Advanced Blockchain as he was Head of Venture until June 2022 - www.linkedin.com/in/richardtmalone/. He has gone on to co-found Drosera Network.

Now, EoT Labs. Till Wendler was one of the co-founders of EoT Labs, along with Leonard Dorlöchter and Max Thake. We have spoken about Till, let me talk Leonard and Max. These two also worked for AB, Leonard was Head of Product and Max was Head of Marketing. EoT Labs was incubated by AB and there was a manager buyout. From that EoT Labs and peaq spawned as stand alone entities from AB. EoT helps incubate companies, develop and support, meanwhile peaq is the public DLT. Advanced Blockchain maintains 37% ownership in EoT Labs and holds a PEAQ-token stake exceeding 2%.

Peaq was co-founded by Julia Poenitzsch, Max Thake, Till Wendler, Pavel Fomenko and Leonard Dorlöchter. Oxford graduate Julia Poenitzsch was Head of Finance at AB from 2017 to 2020, and she is credited as a co-founder of peaq from 2020 until she left in 2022. I cannot find much of her online, she is referenced in Andreas Bolfing’s Cryptographic Primitives in Blockchain Technology here in the acknowledgements – “Thanks also to Phil Windley and Julia Poenitzsch, Head of Finance and Human Resources at Advanced Blockchain AG and peaq, for sharing their knowledge about decentralized and distributed systems”.

Pavel Fomenko was CTO - www.linkedin.com/in/pavlo-fomenko/ - and seems crucial with the early development of peaq’s DAGchain, whitepaper, development and debugging. He moved on from peaq in 2022 much like Julia.

On the left is Leonard Dorlöchter and on the right is Max Thake.

Till Wendler met Leonard in 2015 and this is when Leonard was introduced to blockchain technology. Around this time Hivemapper was established, this involved neither of the two, I highlight it as Hivemapper’s capabilities and pitch would have been known at this time. A similar project on peaq today is the Natix Network.

At this time Max Thake was living in Malta, his place of birth. He went to MCAST - The Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology - and he was hungry to make an impact. In Europe there is the Erasmus programme and this allows EU student to go on a university exchange. He got the opportunity to attend an internship at a start-up hub in Berlin, at the age of 21 in 2017.

Küfner believes Berlin is the centre of crypto with the amount of bright minds and pioneering companies that want to elevate the technology. There was Max surrounded by this culture of business, ideas and belief. It is at this juncture where he met Leonard Dorlöchter and Till Wendler, the ideas started flowing and there was the dare to dream. Where Till convinced Leonard, it was Leonard who gave Max his ‘a-ha’ moment.

He dropped out of MCAST to join the other two, got involved with Nakamo.to and Advanced Blockchain. They consulted with 20 large companies to understand the gaps in existing blockchain solutions.

From the Malta Times article in 2020, “Since Peaq was set up, it has worked with a large German car company to create a platform by which all car companies will pool their resources to create a decentralised network of charging stations for electric vehicles. This will aim to speed up the adoption of electric cars that is currently hindered by the fragmented nature of charging stations.”

In 2020, peaq also had a deal with NTT Global Data Centres and has successfully integrated with them as well as FATH Mechatronics in May 2022. Recently, NTT work with Gaia-X initiative and have been making further efforts for their presence in Paris and Berlin.

Max Thake has been invited and is a part of the Forbes Technology Council, which is comprises of executives and senior leaders who come together and discuss ideas and network. A fantastic opportunity for him and the company as Forbes puts his articles on their website, here is an example - www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/12/12/depin-how-its-transforming-the-business-model-for-iot-manufacturers/

2019 and Max joined Kairos, this later changed its name to Sigma Squared Society. Leonard was later invited into the Sigma Squared Society, which involves young, highly ambitious, precocious entrepreneurs coming together, exchanging ideas and potential for investment - docsend.com/view/hzq6w3vqysku8adi  / www.linkedin.com/posts/max-thake_kairos-sigma-squared-society-i-joined-activity-6807295113425887232-8-C7

You can see this pay off, one example, EWOR work with peaq. Daniel Dippold went to SSS too and went onto establish EWOR, it funds projects and helps people find funding. In April 2023, in partnership with peaq, EWOR launched a 10-month Web 3 programme to build dApps and depins on peaq.

Xavier Sarras was a board advisor at SSS and he was in the 2020 Angel funding round for peaq and continues to be an advisory to this day. He is the founding partner of 4P Capital and said, “Peaq has the best prerequisites to prove to be a rare success story for a German deep-tech start-up”.

The former German CEO of CISCO Michael Ganser was involved, Friedrich Neuman applied his funds, he had a company that Deloitte bought and he took on a Senior Advisor role at the company, here is his website - https://www.frdrch.vc/ he considers himself a climate tech angel investor.

The managing director of the Berlin Angel Fund Steffen Seifarth was involved in the round and is on the advisory board for peaq. Plus there are those that work within Advanced Blockchain that would have invested too, such as Geike et al.

Later there were private investors such as Gabis Medrano, who has been involved with Celestia and Nillion. Kartik Grag invested, he was the director at Elkay Telelinks and comes from a background with investments into Animoca, Ripple, and vast array of companies.

Fundamental Labs led a Series A round in 2021, which raised $6mm to mainly help the development team. Henry love, managing partner of Fundamental Labs, would then invest in Advanced Blockchain’s Composable Finance and become its CEO. He is a part of the Elevation Council Network that boasts a large network of executives, both current and former, of the Fortune 500 and Global 2000.

Other companies that invested in this round included HashKey Capital, GSR, Delta-v Capital, Mulana Capital, Cypher Capital, GravityX Capital, Waterdrip Capital, Ceras Ventures, Master Ventures and Moonrock Capital. Peaq is Moonrock Capitals largest investment.

The next raise reached $15 million and was led by Generative Ventures and Borderless Capital. Lex Sokolin is the co-founder of Generative and was the Chief Cryptoeconomics Officer at Consensys, Global Director of Fintech Strategy at Autonomous Research and previous roles at Lehman Brothers. Borderless Capital are notable for leading the Algorand and Wormhole.

Last year, Borderless launched a $50mm fund for cross-chain projects powered by Wormhole. Outlier Ventures with help from Borderless have launched a boot camp to help accelerate projects. Recently, Max Thake was made a mentor for Outlier Ventures’s DePIN base camp, it lasts for 12 weeks and teams can gain $200,000 investment into their project. Outlier have done base camps for peaq’s partners Fetch and Ocean.

Earlier this year, peaq and Wormhole announced their partnership and this will greatly aid connection and liquidity with over 30 other blockchains.

The idea journey starts with 3 guys talking about blockchain in Berlin and it has attracted a rolling boulder of investment and interest.

That’s a lot of investment “faith” from big companies into what seems like a youthful team, however, I will counter that, as explored, EoT Labs/peaq comes from Advanced Blockchain and has a strong array of experienced heads and practiced advisors standing behind the team. Added to that, Max and Leonard are multi-linguists, plus with their energy, that is an adaptable skill to have in engaging the press side of matters such as podcasts and conferences.

I hope this has given you enough to aid your own research. Here is a project from the hub of Berlin that is in a nexus of a supranational state (EU) and multinational companies such as Bosch with a lot of crypto capital behind it. With the push of ESG and EV, a great drive for it is Tesla, which is creating the standard for charging stations therefore it isn’t simply Tesla the peaqosystem can gain from but also other car manufacturers.

Recently, MapMetrics moved from Solana over to peaq and Natix confirmed a successful integration of peaq IDs into its network.

With IoT we can detect, data capture and analyse with more precision, which is particularly helpful with resource gathering and management. Do expect more agricultural based IoT dapps, already there is Farmsent on peaq. In 2022, agritech farming marking was worth $22bn and is projected to be $75bn by 2032. IoT will help reduce food waste from production to retail and it is simply not just limited to farming.

It can help detect and find important resources in the ground and in water then maximise the use and efficiency of the yields. The truly astonishing phosphate discovery in Norway is great for both farming and the EV industries, as it is a great fertiliser and phosphate is also used for the LFP battery. If Norway can find a gluttonous amount of phosphorous under its feet what more will humanity discover with the aid of IoT?

6/5/2024

Are mushrooms cool?

Morel less.

Peaq and Krest are apart of a DePIN-focussed infrastructure. Krest runs on Kusama and is where projects can experiment before going onto Peaq, which is the main chain. In some cases, projects will choose to stay on Krest.

Peaq currently runs at 10,000 tps with theorectical ceiling of 100,000, the tx cost is reported to be $0.00025. Running on Polkadot it also has a partnership with Wormhole to help connect with the many other blockchains out there.

Also, to clarify, peaq like to spell peaq in lowercase. That is the rule.

In Leonard Dorlöchter’s own words - “McDonald’s recently revealed it was experimenting with AI-powered assistant machines for the drive-through services. The project is for now in its pilot, but let’s say it takes off. Then, in a few years, these cool machines would have created a few jobs for maintenance engineers — and wiped out hundreds of jobs for actual human assistants.

“In other words, the AI boom we see today is exacerbating a process that had already been gaining pace with automation of manual labor. As machines — things, as you might also call them — grow smarter, they can take over more and more functions and produce more and more value, both for humans and for other machines. The revenues from this go to the few while denying the many a chance to put food on the table. But while there’s no turning back on automation, it does not have to follow the ruthless logic of centralization of power and value. It can still go another way — peaq’s way.

“peaq’s mission is to power the Economy of Things, a system of economic relations where automation creates more and more value, but its boons are shared in a more equitable manner. The network enables such things as fractionalized ownership over fleets of connected machines and infrastructure hardware, which allows everyone to have their stake in the connected devices serving their needs. Think of it as a transition from corporations to communities of co-owners who have a piece in the ever-growing pie that automation is already cooking.

“krest, for its part, is peaq’s canary chain, the live-fast-die-young production-grade environment where builders come to test their dApps and decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs) with real-world connectivity, but without the risk of real-world harm. Think of it as the stage where builders do their grand rehearsals before the premiere, which takes place on the peaq mainnet.”

Norway has done it again.

They hit a massive jackpot with the gas and oil along the Norwegian continental shelf. Oil and gas is usually found in authoritarian and inequal societies but here is Norway. A country that has a small population and despite its size it has a tiny amount of arable land. The mountains and fjords leads to tiny pockets of populace dotted about the Scandinavian land mass and it led to a sort-of-decentralised society where they all hand to trust one another for the greater good of making the most out of their resources, which was mainly fishing and making use of hydro-power.

Then they discovered their bountiful gas and oil and remarkably didn’t bloody ruin the spoils of this. They eventually put the money from the dead dinosaur fuel into a sovereign wealth fund that is worth $1.548tn. Norway, the population of 5.5 million, held 1.5% of the whole world’s listed companies. We haven’t seen numbers like that since Genghis Khan.

Here is the done it again part.

They discovered an absolute mind-******* **** ****tonne of phosphate in Norway.

Ten years ago, there were articles alarming that we desperately need to find more phosphorus, you cannot substitute phosporus and the source? Dead sea creatures from 10 millions years ago. Has anyone got a spare 10 millions years to wait?

There are little deposits of it dotted in China, Australia, Egypt and such however, 71% of the worlds supply was in Morocco. UNTIL the Norwegians stepped up and thought, “shall we tell them?” and announced to the world that, “HELLO! NORWAY HERE, SORRY WE HAVE TO SHOUT OVER THE SOUND OF HOW MUCH MONEY WE ARE MAKING. WE HAVE JUST DISCOVERED 70 BILLION TONNES OF PHOSPHORUS! NO, I AM NOT MESSING WITH YOU. YES, I KNOW THE WORLD SUPPLY IS 71 BILLION TONNES, CONSIDER IT DOUBLED!”

They discovered the equivalent of the known world’s supply of phosphorus under their feet. I love you Norway, I love how you do things, genuinely happy for you. Show us how to make the most of it.

The EU then went, “Oh brilliant” like a cousin who finds out you won the lottery and is suddenly camping on your front lawn. Norway is given privileges whilst not being in the EU. With the tensions in this world becoming multi-polar and Europe is relatively natural resource poor when compared to other continents, Norway is going to make so much money from its neighbours.

On top of that they have remittance from Erling Haaland’s goal bonus.

There appears to be an attempt to make the world Post-America, we are going to have various centres of power and it is quite tumultuous. Too high of a concentration of semiconductors are in Taiwan, an island China wants to bring back into the fold. America and China are decoupling, China has most of the critical raw materials. Russia is providing an alternative international payment system to SWIFT. BRICs is gaining momentum. The Middle East. AI. Rich people getting richer. Poor people are screwed. It is all a bit much.

The EU is trying to push back against external encroachment. The EU is a huge, albeit complicated, force and the US has attempted to dominate its infrastructure, one of them is the cloud infrastructure. The usual suspects were setting up data centres and veins across Europe; AWS, Google, and Microsoft all placing roots in the appendix called Europe.

The digital sovereignty was slipping away from Europe and they needed to think up something in response. The French raised a white flag but the Germans ushered France to lower the flag, “Not this time.” The top French heads and German minds sat down and decided to initiate a project to help provide a European data infrastructure made by Europeans. A federated secure data infrastructure as the US and China have different values when it comes to data privacy, transparency, storage, and security.

This led to an international non-profit organization based in Belgium called Gaia-X. Gaia-X was announced at the Digital Summit 2019 in Dortmund and this signalled a new era for European data. It involved French and German governments along with over 300 organisations that are large corporations and SMEs.

The French founding members were:OrangeAmadeusEDFIMTScalewaySafranDocaposteOVHcloudOutscaleATOS

The founding members from the German side were:SAP Beckhoff Automation BMW DE-CIXGerman Edge Cloud PlusServer Siemens Deustche Telekom Bosch

CISPE, IDSA, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.

These are some big players. SAP, depending on the year, is often in the top 5 SaaS companies. OVHcloud is the largest hosting provider in Europe, 3rd largest in the world, it has the largest data centre based on surface area. ATOS are massive in cybersecurity and cloud computing, they have a big contracts with large companies such as Coca-Cola, utilising AI and IoT. I can go more into each company but we will be here all day.

Scaleaway left the project. It is worth nothing why they departed. Scaleaway believed in the objectives of Gaia-X to protect European interests in the Euro infrastructure of cloud and big tech. However, as the project progressed, Scaleaway noted that the German counterparts and French consumers of big tech wanted to keep US big tech involved. Scaleaway felt this was an asymmetrical relationship and US does not grant these privileges to EU firms and it was going back on the original principles of the Gaia-X initiative.

Having industrial leaders from Germany and France was always going to lead to a clash of opinions but Gaia-X, in the long term, interconnection and network providers can provide end-to-end services across multiple networks in a federated, dedicated GAIA-X communication infrastructure.

One particular company to focus on here is Bosch. A business institute from Germany, it provides devices and services in engineering and for tech companies around the world. They are the world's largest sensor manufacturer and one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers. Bosch employs over 400,000 people worldwide and is a global player in multiple industries including mobility, consumer goods, industrial technology and energy and building technology.

At 12:53pm, July 20th, 2015, Bosch announced on Twitter they were launching the Bosch Global Service Solutions division - twitter.com/boschglobal/status/626722360415121408 – stating, “Bosch sets up new division "Bosch Global Service Solutions": huge growth potential with connected services #IoT”

The division “offers outsourcing for business processes and services, primarily for customers in the automotive, travel, and logistics industries and in information and communications technology”.

IoT references to the Internet-of-Things, in brief, it is devices (things) connecting on a network, transmitting data.

A reason to jump into IoT is down to Bosch wanting to be a standard-setter, it wasn’t an overnight decision, Bosch has been playing with IoT since 2008. With that announcement, it went hand in hand with the goal to be a the leading IoT provider by 2025. To do so they have pivoted from being a manufacturing, service-orientated company to an IoT company as of 2016.

Setting the standards within IoT has a huge upside for Bosch. According to a McKinsey 2015 report, the upside could be $11tn for IoT across 9 sectors.

Move into 2021, McKinsey reviewed IoT once again and believed the acceleration towards it was faster than they had anticipated. stating, “By 2030, we estimate that it could enable $5.5 trillion to $12.6 trillion in value globally, including the value captured by consumers and customers of IoT products and services.” Vehicles was highlighted to have $430bn – 620bn in IoT value.

They further highlight, “autonomous vehicles (which include partial-driving automation, or level-two autonomy, and up) make up the fastest-growing IoT-value cluster. Its expected CAGR between 2020 and 2030 is 37 percent (to $0.3 trillion in 2030, from $0.01 trillion in 2020) in the high-end scenario.”

Their 2021 report also says, “Networks act as the backbone that bring the IoT to life and make it all possible. Telecom companies’ fourth-generation (4G) networks have spread to cover more people at higher performance, and 5G networks are rapidly being deployed.”

On quick digression, if you want to read the “5G IoT Global Market Report 2023” by McKinsey, it costs $4,800.

With 5G adoption comes latency is as low as 1ms, more bits per Hz, multi-gbps peak rates, radical optimisation of network efficiency, and more hyper-densification. IBM have reported autonomous cars could collect more than 1 terabyte of data a day. 5g latency helps cars “see” further as they can connect with any individual built-in device in the area as the low band to high band frequencies covers hundreds of square miles.

It is not just autonomous cars, this impacts sectors such as AR, AI, agriculture, healthcare, energy, supply chains, logistics. McKinsey predict 60% of the world population will be covered by 5G. This is not just a significant advancement for IoT, as mobile and internet connectivity expands across the world, more people can onboard financially, as is often the touted objective of the BIS, WEF, WB, etc.

To bring it back to cars, they need a lot of sensors and go through a lot of data. A Tesla vehicle is equipped with 8 external cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors and an onboard computer. It has an autopilot feature, it can park itself, it receives satellite data but also camera data, it has patches to safety and it can communicate with other cars on the network.

In 2014, Tesla were able to fix 30,000 cars with a software update as a fault in one car was detected and the solution was applied to other cars, this was due to the innovation that is IoT.

Elon Musk said in an interview that Tesla will have a “ChatGPT moment”, his quote being, “"Tesla will have sort of a ChatGPT moment, maybe if not this year, I'd say no later than next year… "Three million cars will drive themselves with no one. And then 5 million cars and then 10 million cars."

Near the end of 2022, Musk said “to solve full self-driving, you actually have to solve real-world artificial intelligence, which nobody has solved.”

“The whole road system is made for biological neural nets and eyes. …In order to solve for full self-driving, we have to solve neural nets and cameras to a degree of capability that is on par with or really exceeds humans.”

“And I think we will achieve that this year,” Musk said.

Tesla have released the FSD system (Full Self Driving) and thought it has autonomous features but this is not technically autonomous, it requires the driver to still be vigilant and have their hands on the steering wheel.

The EU-funded Gaia-X has a project called MoveID, which is led by Bosch, and it presented this at the IAA show 2023 - “Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung” a.k.a International Motor Show. There was a demonstration with Tesla and Jaguar EVs autonomous transactions between connected devices and how they streamline expenses and add new revenue streams. This is a decentralised mobility system.

With leveraging blockchain, through the use of SSI (Self-Sovereign IDs) connect vehicles to infrastructure and generate value.

Here are the companies involved:TeslaJaguarDeltaDao AG - www.delta-dao.com/ They partner with AirBus, Ocean Protocol, Oasis Network, Dione-X, Dutch Blockchain Coaltion, Polygon, Membrane Finance, Gaia-X and more. They help monetise AI and data as well as consult companies on being Gaia-X compliant. The co-founder, Kai Meinke, is also the lead of Gaia-X Open-Source Software Community.Denso - www.denso.com/de/en/business/business-field/ A Japanese business that has gained independence from Toyota, its name means “Electric Device”. Denso MaaS is their IoT cloud-based tech, they provide AI, safety, parts, they will be crucial in supporting and providing parts for the infrastructure needed. It is a huge organisation.

Datarella - datarella.com/ A Web 3 company centred on building other projects for autonomous connection. They utilise tech partnerships with Ethereum, Hyperledger, Cosmos, Arweave, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol. Its partners are Bosch, BMW, Daimler, ESA, Otto Group, Max Plank, ID Union, World Food Programme, along with ties EU and UK government funding initiatives.

Ocean Protocol - oceanprotocol.com This helps bridge data silos and tokenise the AI and data. A Decentralised data-sharing protocol.

Fetch.ai - https://fetch.ai/ a protocol to connect AI agents as well as help build and deploy them, they raised $62mm across 4 funding rounds. The Fetch.ai Foundation was started by Fetch and Bosch.

51 nodes - www.51nodes.io/en/ Help develop blockchain innovations and integrations. Involved with SSI and Technical design, full-stack software, blockchain development, hardware and systems integration, ecosystem, and venture management. Below is their network:

htw saar - fgvt.htwsaar.de/site/en/ A key research group with European funding, focussed on information and communication architectures.

Materna - www.materna.com/EN/About-us/Our-Partners/our-partners_node.html A strong big tech partnership network, Materna have significant clients where they apply IT solutions. Owned by two private founding families.

Continental - www.continental.com/en/ Global provider of automotive technologies.

Wobcom - www.wobcom.de/ueber-uns/ Wolfsburg based internet, telecom provider.

Esec - www.ecsec.de/ueber-ecsec/  Involved with chip cards, electronic signatures, identity management, and internet security.

ATOS - atos.net/en-gb/united-kingdom French big cloud, big data company.

Chainstep - chainstep.com/ End to end partner for deep tech.

Zeppelin University – AyeAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Bigchain - www.bigchaindb.com/about/ Partnered with the likes of Porsche, Polkadot, Toyota, allowing large applications to utilise data, harness data marketplaces, and provide solutions.

ITK - https://www.itk-engineering.de/ A digital engineering firm that focusses on mobility, healthcare, and industry.

DLR - https://www.dlr.de/de/das-dlr/ueber-uns The German Federal Space Agency.

Of course Bosch and then there is peaq…

The EU favours Polkadot and in June 2023, Stasis announced they would be the largest euro-backed stablecoin on the market and it is launching on Polkadot. Deloitte has integrated KILT to help with KYC, KILT is a parachain of Polkadot. Deutsche Telecom have a validator spot on Polkadot, peaq is built on Dot. This is all after the EU Commission looked into Polkadot as a part of the #DLT4Good project.

Peaq Network is built on top of Polkadot and peaq co-founder Leonard Dorlochter spoke about the project at Polkadot’s Decoded conference last year and the marketing stresses the use of Tesla’s. On Polkadot’s twitter they posted the fact there was a peaq branded Tesla outside the conference (twitter.com/Polkadot/status/1674070193016823809). If you do search for peaq or listen to interviews/talks in the first few minutes, if not seconds, there is a mention of electric vehicles and Tesla.

If you follow this link you will see from Max Thake (peaq CEO) write about the concept of Universal Basic Ownership (UBO) - maxthake.medium.com/universal-basic-ownership-ubo-fe449056c8a1

Within the article he quotes Elon Musk. May seem like nothing, Leonard Dorlochter quotes Confucius in this LinkedIn post, doesn’t mean he knows the guy. He also name drops Elon Musk - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leonarddorloechter_confucius-once-said-a-healthy-man-wants-activity-7018154404700659712-aFwH/

This is business and there are subtleties and nuances. The quotes and name drops are a hint.

In 2021, peaq came first in an eMobility breakthrough award - www.connect.de/news/breaktrough-award-2021-sieger-connect-3202032.html - and they received 300,000 euros in media services. The same year, the peaq twitter page posted this:

Here is a map of Berlin with the Tesla locations, it shows the supercharger, the stores and the giga factory:

Here is peaq Berlin HQ, also known as EoT Labs HQ, Kurfürstendamm 11, 10719 Berlin, Germany:

Again, what’s the big deal? We have a quotation from Elon Musk in an early blog post from the CEO of peaq, they tweet about visiting their neighbour’s gigafactory and @ them in the tweet on their official twitter page the same year they win a breakthrough award on emobility.

Being in the same city as a major business can be a coincidence, after all, Berlin is Germany’s start-up capital and it only has the highest density of research institutes in Europe, and many of these have a particularly high degree of competence in the fields of energy storage and manufacturing technologies.

I have already highlighted the fact that Tesla have cars on Eloop, which is on peaq. What I am alluding to here is the co-operation between peaq and Tesla may even predate peaqs official founding. That is speculation and dot-joining, there are other car manufacturers looking towards EoT such as Audi and Jaguar.

The team of peaq began working in 2018 and have been working with industry leaders on DID since 2019. Also in 2019, Tesla announced they would open a gigafactory in Berlin and the intention was to release the Y Model in 2021 through the factory. The factory was officially opened in March 2022.

At Decoded 2023, Leonard said, “as vehicles, robots and devices on land, at sea, in the sky or EVEN IN SPACE…” he stresses the space part and Musk is known for sending unmonitored satellites into space.

Having said that, peaq do also have with the German Space Agency - the DLR - who worked with Space X in 2021 to send a European astronaut to the ISS. A year later, SpaceX assisted with launching special environmental satellite ENMAP – the abbreviation stands for Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program. The DLR receive data from the ENMAP satellite and this is processed within by the  German Remote Sensing Data Center (Deutsches Fernerkundungsdatenzentrum; DFD) and the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (Institut für Methodik der Fernerkundung; IMF).

2023, SpaceX helped the ESA ship Swedish astronaut named Marcus Wandt to the ISS. More recently, NASA and DLR confirmed another joint mission to monitor climate change, something I will come back to later.

In case you have just come back from living in the Amazon for a couple of decades, Tesla is a company that has been building EV cars from the ground up, with supply chain management from resource to final product. Tesla makes use of its megapacks and will receive vast amounts of venture from energy storage. They will release virtual power plants and customers can make earnings from providing energy for the grid.

Tesla has been training its D1 AI chip since 2021 and they are still making use of Nvidia hardware. This aids Tesla’s FSD, the semi-autonomous driving feature for their cars. The cars have been fed billions of miles and hours of footage from the best drivers. Musk said in 2023 that Tesla could have a Chat GPT moment whereby a handful of self-driving Tesla’s can expand to 3 million, then 5 million, then that doubles and so on.

When you have a self-driving car that may be sat at home this can be utilised as a taxi. Tesla will get a share of the fare and bear this in mind, Tesla made $96.77bn in revenue last year whilst Uber made$37.28bn in revenue, if Tesla have their GPT moment and self-driving robotaxi’s proliferate that is going to bring in a huge amounts of revenue.

Recently, Tesla showcased their robotaxi app and its functions plus Musk is christening the service CyberCab. There is an estimation that by 2030 there will be 116 million EVs globally and Tesla is striving to set the standard. E-Loop shared the stage with peaq when it was announced Tesla is coming to Polkadot as E-Loop in June 2023 tokenised 100 Tesla’s in Vienna, users to own a fraction of the fleet and share the revenue the cars generate from daily rideshare operations.

In 2014, Tesla gave away its IP to help stimulate EV growth as may car manufacturers, in spite of their massive manufacturing capabilities, hardly produced any zero-emission cars.

This means Tesla are so far ahead of their competitors they have the initiative on establishing the standards for charging stations. From 2012, Tesla have been creating a network of Supercharger stations for their vehicles. Tesla in 2021/2022 announced the North American Charging Standard (NACS) and its competitor was CCS standard used by any other EV. Aforementioned, Tesla were and still are producing vast amounts of EVs compared to many of their competitors and by 2024 Ford, Mercedes, Nissan, Honda/Acura, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, Toyota, Lexus, Rolls Royce, Mini and Jaguar plus a couple of others have adopted the NACS standard.

Here is a map of Tesla Superchargers:

There are over 45,000 Tesla Superchargers worldwide, 12,000 of them are in North America. This network is bigger than all competitors combined.

Most EV charging happens at home, a stark benefit over our conventional fuel combustion engine, but this means the electrical grid needs to be taken into consideration. There are multiple papers that discuss how to manage stress on the electrical grid with the advent of EVs becoming more popular. Couple that with a fragmented network of charging ports and this becomes a complicated issue.

However, a way to get around this is having smart charging spots, peer-to-peer charging and utilising blockchain for SSIs (Self-Sovereign Identities).

In the Economy-of-Things, machines and devices will need to have SSIs to interact with one another and identify what they are sharing data with. To quote peaqs github, “The peaq DID standard supports machines to discover each other, carry out transactions, verify claims, preserve privacy and remain sovereign.”

Machines need to be identified, authenticated and its credentials verified. In 2023, Gaia-X showcased MoveID at IAA Mobility where a Tesla and Jaguar were on show, to stamp the new era of mobility in Europe. Having a blockchain around this can also help incentivise people to go to less popular charging ports, it helps efficiently data share, provide SSIs, reduce fraud and provide other opportunities for different companies to get involved and that is peaq.

So far, I have highlighted the Gaia movement, Bosch, the optimism of IoT to the economy and Tesla. These are significant forces that should highlight that peaq is involved with market leaders and standard setters. As cities become “smarter”, there will be a dramatic rise in IoT dapps and peaq is geared for the IoT/RWA market.

It has a high decentralisation score with the Nakamoto Coefficient score being 90 and it does 10,000tps with the potential to beat 100,000tps. The block times are 6 seconds and the theory is it can get to 0.25 seconds. EVM and Rust compatible smart contracts with tx costs of $0.00025.

The ecosystem is growing with partnerships being announced regularly, here is to name a few of them - www.peaq.network/ecosystem-page :

Menthol Protocol – a multisided platform offering a one-stop solution to automate companies' and individuals' sustainability goals, with transparent, verifiable, automated, and customer-engaging climate action together with marketing tools. | www.mentholprotocol.com

BloXmove – web3 provider for a worldwide decentralized and collaborative mobility alliance alongside an efficient green energy reality | bloxmove.com/ | www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bloxmove-token

Ator - anonymous-routing ecosystem for a private internet | www.ator.io | coinmarketcap.com/currencies/airtor-protocol/

Wicrypt - decentralised internet access network | wicrypt.com/

Akreen Network - Web3-powered infrastructure for globally-distributed renewable energy resources connection and monetization to enable carbon-reduction application | arkreen.com

Aydo - DePIN of smart homes, think AirBNBs and rental agreements | aydo.ai/

E-Loop Network – tokenise shared vehicles | eloop.network/

Silencio – a decentralised network for noise pollution data | www.silencio.network

Acurast – decentralised GPUs for Depin | acurast.com

Xmaquina - DePIN of tokenized autonomous robots | www.xmaquina.io

Penomo – “tokenize real world physical infrastructure, especially renewable energy assets like PV units, storage batteries, wind farms and more” | penomo.io

Natix Network – mapping network | www.natix.network

Map Metrics – navigation map built entirely by the community for the community| mapmetrics.org/

Farmsent - blockchain platform connecting farmers with buyers, promoting food security and prioritizing small farmers. | www.farmsent.io/ | coinmarketcap.com/currencies/farmsent/

Charge – peer-to-peer charging | www.charge.xyz/

dTelecom – for your decentralised telecom needs | dtelecom.org/

Brainstem - scalable decentralized platform for collecting health data from wearable devices | brainstem.health/

2Blox - a DePIN of AI-powered cameras for counting vehicles on the roads | twitter.com/2bloxaway

Wingbits – flight tracking network | wingbits.com/

EC3 - Distributed Energy Storage | www.ec-cube.io/

Airwaive – depin wireless networks | www.airwaive.org

PowerPod - a shared EV charging network | www.powerpod.pro/

Wayru – decentralised wireless network | www.wayru.io/

Some of these projects would have been tested on Krest and future projects too will go through the Krest simulation.

Krest is tester chain for peaq, think Kusama to Polkadot, in fact Krest runs on Kusama. Having a canary network that is separate from the peaq network allows an opportunity for experimentation and if there is an error it is then separate away from peaq. So far, it is the only simulation chain for DePin projects, a zone to work out smart contract functions, try new consensus mechanisms and governance models.

Krest is already available to buy/sell - www.coingecko.com/en/coins/krest - and at the time of writing holding 2000+ Krest and putting it into a custodial wallet will make you eligible for the peaq airdrop. There is an another phase to the airdrop whereby if you apply a KREST/PEAQ liquidity pool you can get up to 4x the peaq airdrop, do see here for details - www.peaq.network/blog/peaq-airdrop-for-krest-holders-how-to-double-your-rewards

The first phase of the airdrop has $1,000,000 peaq tokens applied to it, the second phase as $2,000,000 peaq token. At the time of writing, in a community call, peaq is pencilled in to go live in 2 to 3 months time. If you are reading this in the future, firstly, how is the weather? Secondly, it may be too late for this.

Nexera (Alliance Block) were helping peaq and Krest launch as these chains were due to integrate Alliance Blocks mNFT however, all the links to articles on this are now broken so I am unsure what has happened here. I know the partnership was still there in 2023, I am unsure what is happening with the mNFT. www.linkedin.com/posts/peaq-network_technology-eot-future-activity-7021055700835442689-Gu5I/?originalSubdomain=mt

I will take this opportunity to look at the funding behind peaq/Krest.

It is always wise to check the funding and backgrounds of people behind a team as if can raise green flags and red flags. I will not name the project, a while ago I found they lost a lot of people’s Ethereum in their project therefore I mentioned to the group at the time not to invest in that particular teams new project. Fortunately, I do not have such concerns when checking behind peaq’s curtains.

A key company to look into when you are researching peaq is Advanced Blockchain. They are the first and oldest exchange-traded company on the Frankfurt stock exchange specializing in blockchain technology, offering their investors early-stage deal flows. January 2017 is when the company went public on the Düsseldorf Stock Exchange. Being listed on FWB means the company has to uphold stringent regulations, this helps their reputation amongst their multi-billion-dollar clients. It is a forward-looking company that is seeking to improve the VC flow in Berlin, Europe and beyond.

Here is a link to their portfolio - www.advancedblockchain.com/portfolio. They were in a private sale of Celestia, Energy Web Foundation (EWT), Neon Labs, Moxy, Fragnova, SDGx, Fractal ID, Manta Network, and Mero, they were in the private round of Polymer as well as the seed round.

AB was in the pre-seed for Polkadot in 2017 and managed about $100,000 a month from staking, the realised profit was $4.5 million. For Arweave, AB were in a Series A round plus they have a particular fund dedicated to the Arweave ecosystem, this is the Permanent Ventures fund established in 2021.

The seed rounds AB have been involved in are Near Protocol, Obol, Alluo, Contango, Maverick, Forest Park, Myso Finance, Sentinel dVPN, Talisman (Polkadot wallet), Apricot Finance, zCloak Network, Sigma Dex, and Trac Bloc.

Projects that have been incubated include Stela Labs, Quasar (exit 2022, ), Instrumental Finance, Warp Finance, Pendulum, Panoptic, Composable Finance and EoT Labs/peaq.

They acquired Nakamo.to and Finpro.

This is a map of the company structure -

Here is a video from 2017 with then AB CEO Michael Geike discussing peaq - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vke4jZQAnbc. Advanced Blockchain is the publicly listed company whereas the Nakamo.to falls under its umbrella, it hosts the tech brains and investors for Web 3 projects. Robert Küfner appears in this video with Michael Geike and Robert at the time was the CEO of Nakamo.to.

Küfner was an early miner of Bitcoin, in 2013 he started Smart Equity AG with Michael Geike, companies such as Deutsche Börse AG were speaking with Robert. In 2014 he became an investor of Ethereum, this is perhaps the where Polkadot and peaq’s relationship has its roots. Gavin was in Kreuzberg when he was programming what would be Ethereum. Robert spoke with Gavin Wood and was hooked, he invested in the Ethereum crowdsale and with his early crypto success of being involved with Bitcoin mining he was involved in the seed sales to many ICOs.

He went on to start Nakamo.to after meeting Till Wendler and Florian Reike at a Berlin Bitcoin gathering in 2017.

He had an interview in 2017 where he spoke of IOTA and its use of Tangle, “The tangle underlying IOTA is quantum-resistant and infinitely scalable. Mining, the waste of energy in bitcoin, is becoming obsolete. I am aware of a large corporation that is switching to the tangle due to the huge benefits over Ethereum transaction fees.”

He was particularly confident of Berlin being a crypto-centre, “Berlin is much cooler for the big names in the industry. Germany has the opportunity to become a leader in distributed ledger technology. Berlin is capital of crypto.”

Here is the link to that interview, he also brings up Ocean Protocol briefly, a partner of peaq – norbertgehrke.medium.com/blockchain-is-outdated-b1578e37e5a8

He does have some good reason for the confidence, in 2018 Porche became the first car manufacturer to implement a blockchain application. This was done using a complex machine learning network to enable a four-door sedan Porsche Panamera to act as the software client independently of backend database support. XAIN was the Berlin-based company that implemented it, they are now known as XAYN. This at the time ran on Ethereum and the team at AB sought to move towards alternatives such as DAG.

The Fraunhofer Society made a partnership with peaq in 2023. Fraunhofer is the largest research group in Europe with a yearly budget of €3 billion and they are starting up a DePin project on peaq. This project ties in with Fraunhofer’s KI2L project. The KI2L project is leveraging AI to make lithium-ion batteries more sustainable, it runs from 2023 to 2026. Jasvir Dhillon was the lead for KI2L at EoT Labs where Fraunhofer have established a partnership leading to penomo to be founded by Dhillon (they don’t like to capitalise their p’s in Berlin).

Allow me to go back to Mr Küfner in 2017. He shared an apartment with Wendler and Reike to set up Nakamo.to and in the same year Nakamo.to became a part of Advanced Blockchain AG, with CEO Michael Geike and Küfner became Chief Visionary Officer. As the years went by Nakamo.to essentially has absorbed into AB.

Advanced Blockchain was co-founded by Geike, Till Wendler, Florian Reike, and Robert Küfner.

Life is fluid and things move on, over time the team has had some changes. Reike is on the advisory board and so too is Küfner. Geike has gone onto 21 Oaks Capital, where peaq’s Leonard is an advisor. To take Geike’s place as CEO is Simon Telian who held the CIO position as well as be a Managing Director at Nakamo.to. Telian had a presentation at Deutsche Börse Cash Market Equity Forum and this attracted the attention of Klaus Rainer Kirchhoff, who runs Kirchhoff Consult AG. Klaus became an advisor for AB and brings is experience with him, “he has successfully guided 72 companies through IPOs and collaborated with prominent DAX-listed companies, the German government, and various other organizations.” (www.advancedblockchain.com/blogs/klaus-rainer-kirchhoff-joins-advanced-blockchain-as-an-advisor-and-investor)

Olav Sorenson is on the supervisory board and is another who has a intellectual weight and experience to help advise, after all he is a scholar of entrepreneurship, he was even awarded the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research for his work. He mainly works at UCLA Anderson School of Management.

One of the original Ethereum engineers, Marek Kotewicz, is an advisor to AB and he has also worked on Polkadot, further increasing the connection between the two organisations. Dr Marcel Tyrell is a fellow advisor, he has a PhD in Banking and Finance.

A useful ally to have on the advisory board is Håkan Saltin. He is the CTO and co-founder of Radtonics, which provides edge computing and 5G networks for autonomous transport. Sebastian Markowsky is an advisor helping AB with investing in new business areas and recently he joined Capitalmind Investec.

Chairman of these splendid supervisors is Rüdiger A. Günther, a German business veteran whose most notable achievement is getting CFO of the year whilst at CLAAS. CLAAS is a German manufacturer in agricultural machinery, he got revenues up to near 5 billion euros.

One character I was slightly confused at is David Kaplan, according to the AB website he is the General Counsel but checking his own Linked In he left AB in 2022. He works at Horizon Law, which deals with Web 3, this may lead to some dealings between the two companies in the future.

An important figure of AB’s history is Richard Malone, who had a background in cybersecurity and digital investments. He helped lead 15 investments for Advanced Blockchain as he was Head of Venture until June 2022 - www.linkedin.com/in/richardtmalone/. He has gone on to co-found Drosera Network.

Now, EoT Labs. Till Wendler was one of the co-founders of EoT Labs, along with Leonard Dorlöchter and Max Thake. We have spoken about Till, let me talk Leonard and Max. These two also worked for AB, Leonard was Head of Product and Max was Head of Marketing. EoT Labs was incubated by AB and there was a manager buyout. From that EoT Labs and peaq spawned as stand alone entities from AB. EoT helps incubate companies, develop and support, meanwhile peaq is the public DLT. Advanced Blockchain maintains 37% ownership in EoT Labs and holds a PEAQ-token stake exceeding 2%.

Peaq was co-founded by Julia Poenitzsch, Max Thake, Till Wendler, Pavel Fomenko and Leonard Dorlöchter. Oxford graduate Julia Poenitzsch was Head of Finance at AB from 2017 to 2020, and she is credited as a co-founder of peaq from 2020 until she left in 2022. I cannot find much of her online, she is referenced in Andreas Bolfing’s Cryptographic Primitives in Blockchain Technology here in the acknowledgements – “Thanks also to Phil Windley and Julia Poenitzsch, Head of Finance and Human Resources at Advanced Blockchain AG and peaq, for sharing their knowledge about decentralized and distributed systems”.

Pavel Fomenko was CTO - www.linkedin.com/in/pavlo-fomenko/ - and seems crucial with the early development of peaq’s DAGchain, whitepaper, development and debugging. He moved on from peaq in 2022 much like Julia.

On the left is Leonard Dorlöchter and on the right is Max Thake.

Till Wendler met Leonard in 2015 and this is when Leonard was introduced to blockchain technology. Around this time Hivemapper was established, this involved neither of the two, I highlight it as Hivemapper’s capabilities and pitch would have been known at this time. A similar project on peaq today is the Natix Network.

At this time Max Thake was living in Malta, his place of birth. He went to MCAST - The Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology - and he was hungry to make an impact. In Europe there is the Erasmus programme and this allows EU student to go on a university exchange. He got the opportunity to attend an internship at a start-up hub in Berlin, at the age of 21 in 2017.

Küfner believes Berlin is the centre of crypto with the amount of bright minds and pioneering companies that want to elevate the technology. There was Max surrounded by this culture of business, ideas and belief. It is at this juncture where he met Leonard Dorlöchter and Till Wendler, the ideas started flowing and there was the dare to dream. Where Till convinced Leonard, it was Leonard who gave Max his ‘a-ha’ moment.

He dropped out of MCAST to join the other two, got involved with Nakamo.to and Advanced Blockchain. They consulted with 20 large companies to understand the gaps in existing blockchain solutions.

From the Malta Times article in 2020, “Since Peaq was set up, it has worked with a large German car company to create a platform by which all car companies will pool their resources to create a decentralised network of charging stations for electric vehicles. This will aim to speed up the adoption of electric cars that is currently hindered by the fragmented nature of charging stations.”

In 2020, peaq also had a deal with NTT Global Data Centres and has successfully integrated with them as well as FATH Mechatronics in May 2022. Recently, NTT work with Gaia-X initiative and have been making further efforts for their presence in Paris and Berlin.

Max Thake has been invited and is a part of the Forbes Technology Council, which is comprises of executives and senior leaders who come together and discuss ideas and network. A fantastic opportunity for him and the company as Forbes puts his articles on their website, here is an example - www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/12/12/depin-how-its-transforming-the-business-model-for-iot-manufacturers/

2019 and Max joined Kairos, this later changed its name to Sigma Squared Society. Leonard was later invited into the Sigma Squared Society, which involves young, highly ambitious, precocious entrepreneurs coming together, exchanging ideas and potential for investment - docsend.com/view/hzq6w3vqysku8adi  / www.linkedin.com/posts/max-thake_kairos-sigma-squared-society-i-joined-activity-6807295113425887232-8-C7

You can see this pay off, one example, EWOR work with peaq. Daniel Dippold went to SSS too and went onto establish EWOR, it funds projects and helps people find funding. In April 2023, in partnership with peaq, EWOR launched a 10-month Web 3 programme to build dApps and depins on peaq.

Xavier Sarras was a board advisor at SSS and he was in the 2020 Angel funding round for peaq and continues to be an advisory to this day. He is the founding partner of 4P Capital and said, “Peaq has the best prerequisites to prove to be a rare success story for a German deep-tech start-up”.

The former German CEO of CISCO Michael Ganser was involved, Friedrich Neuman applied his funds, he had a company that Deloitte bought and he took on a Senior Advisor role at the company, here is his website - https://www.frdrch.vc/ he considers himself a climate tech angel investor.

The managing director of the Berlin Angel Fund Steffen Seifarth was involved in the round and is on the advisory board for peaq. Plus there are those that work within Advanced Blockchain that would have invested too, such as Geike et al.

Later there were private investors such as Gabis Medrano, who has been involved with Celestia and Nillion. Kartik Grag invested, he was the director at Elkay Telelinks and comes from a background with investments into Animoca, Ripple, and vast array of companies.

Fundamental Labs led a Series A round in 2021, which raised $6mm to mainly help the development team. Henry love, managing partner of Fundamental Labs, would then invest in Advanced Blockchain’s Composable Finance and become its CEO. He is a part of the Elevation Council Network that boasts a large network of executives, both current and former, of the Fortune 500 and Global 2000.

Other companies that invested in this round included HashKey Capital, GSR, Delta-v Capital, Mulana Capital, Cypher Capital, GravityX Capital, Waterdrip Capital, Ceras Ventures, Master Ventures and Moonrock Capital. Peaq is Moonrock Capitals largest investment.

The next raise reached $15 million and was led by Generative Ventures and Borderless Capital. Lex Sokolin is the co-founder of Generative and was the Chief Cryptoeconomics Officer at Consensys, Global Director of Fintech Strategy at Autonomous Research and previous roles at Lehman Brothers. Borderless Capital are notable for leading the Algorand and Wormhole.

Last year, Borderless launched a $50mm fund for cross-chain projects powered by Wormhole. Outlier Ventures with help from Borderless have launched a boot camp to help accelerate projects. Recently, Max Thake was made a mentor for Outlier Ventures’s DePIN base camp, it lasts for 12 weeks and teams can gain $200,000 investment into their project. Outlier have done base camps for peaq’s partners Fetch and Ocean.

Earlier this year, peaq and Wormhole announced their partnership and this will greatly aid connection and liquidity with over 30 other blockchains.

The idea journey starts with 3 guys talking about blockchain in Berlin and it has attracted a rolling boulder of investment and interest.

That’s a lot of investment “faith” from big companies into what seems like a youthful team, however, I will counter that, as explored, EoT Labs/peaq comes from Advanced Blockchain and has a strong array of experienced heads and practiced advisors standing behind the team. Added to that, Max and Leonard are multi-linguists, plus with their energy, that is an adaptable skill to have in engaging the press side of matters such as podcasts and conferences.

I hope this has given you enough to aid your own research. Here is a project from the hub of Berlin that is in a nexus of a supranational state (EU) and multinational companies such as Bosch with a lot of crypto capital behind it. With the push of ESG and EV, a great drive for it is Tesla, which is creating the standard for charging stations therefore it isn’t simply Tesla the peaqosystem can gain from but also other car manufacturers.

Recently, MapMetrics moved from Solana over to peaq and Natix confirmed a successful integration of peaq IDs into its network.

With IoT we can detect, data capture and analyse with more precision, which is particularly helpful with resource gathering and management. Do expect more agricultural based IoT dapps, already there is Farmsent on peaq. In 2022, agritech farming marking was worth $22bn and is projected to be $75bn by 2032. IoT will help reduce food waste from production to retail and it is simply not just limited to farming.

It can help detect and find important resources in the ground and in water then maximise the use and efficiency of the yields. The truly astonishing phosphate discovery in Norway is great for both farming and the EV industries, as it is a great fertiliser and phosphate is also used for the LFP battery. If Norway can find a gluttonous amount of phosphorous under its feet what more will humanity discover with the aid of IoT?