Web3’s Future is in the Real World, and peaq is Leading the Way

Connected machines generating value are a crucial pillar of today’s economy — and peaq is bringing them on-chain.

Imagine something as mundane as riding to work with a car-sharing vehicle. You open the app, find an available vehicle in the area, get stuck in a few traffic jams along the way, and drop it off at a parking lot. That’s it, done. You paid to ride a vehicle owned by a company that has copious amounts of data on you (while just receiving a lot more), and may or may not resell this data further to different brokers and agencies.

But things never had to be so dystopian. You could have taken a ride on a shared vehicle from a fleet owned by the community (yourself included), where revenues are distributed between all participants. And those traffic jams your dashcam saw along the way — that’s valuable data for various navigation services and for urban planners too. You could have sold it, securely and safely, with full respect to everyone’s privacy - this could have bought you a coffee from a community-owned robo-cafe on your way to the office.

The second scenario probably sounds fantastic in both senses, meaning it’s better and unrealistic. But mind you, that is the scenario that peaq, the Web3 network powering the Economy of Things, works to enable, and it perfectly showcases some of the things that peaq is all about. Things like AI and DePINs, or decentralized physical infrastructure networks, things that are all the rage in the Web3 space and beyond these days. 

Blockchain is going real-world — let’s see how.

Pinning Down the DePINs

While shared mobility services are on the rise amid dwindling vehicle ownership and a push for more sustainability, this segment has its own fair share of controversies. From apps guzzling up and re-selling user data to Big Tech middlemen taking a hefty cut from the revenues of the struggling gig workers, the field has room for improvement.

Besides all that, there are two sides of the ownership issue. Ride-hailing apps own no cars, but for the driver, who took out a loan to buy the vehicle and is now stuck in the vicious circle of working just to be able to maintain their position, owning the car is a liability. Car-sharing users, for their part, usually do not own the vehicles they drive, using them on someone else’s terms and discretion. 

Web3 stack enables shared, fractionalized ownership over connected devices and machines. Running on-chain, a community-owned vehicle fleet would distribute the earnings from every ride across the network, removing a Big Tech middleman out of the picture and enable the people using and benefitting from any given physical infrastructure — vehicles, in his case — to jointly own it. Powered by Web3 technologies, the approach zooms in on real-world demand and real-world services, which make for a healthy source of liquidity and growth for the network. 

Part of the wider Polkadot ecosystem, peaq embraces this approach as it provides a layer-1 digital backbone for connected machines to generate value for humans and other machines. Its core functions include Self-Sovereign Machine Identities, Role-Based Control Access, and machine payments, making up a foundational set of tools needed for applications leveraging connected devices. Earlier this year, it unveiled an integration with bloXmove, a Mercedes offshoot, which will build a Web3 version of Uber on the network. The vehicles running as part of this service will be owned by members of the communities they serve, and will make a decentralized physical infrastructure network providing mobility services without centralized mediators. 

AI Boom will Transform Economies

ChatGPT has unleashed a new tidal wave of appetite for AI innovation — as well as precarious warnings of what this technology may lead to as far as the job market is concerned. With its fractionalized ownership model, peaq offers a model where humans still get to earn as AI-powered machines take on more and more jobs. But the potential of AI is not limited to that.

NATIX, another DePIN that recently joined the peaq ecosystem, brings AI to edge devices such as smartphones and cameras. This transforms them into smart data-processing hubs that are generating insights on the go, ready to be monetized without revealing any sensitive information. That’s where the dashcam detection in our ride to work comes from, bringing AI to a device you carry around in your pocket 24/7.

By aiming at smartphone users, this DePIN can scale to billions of devices leveraging blockchain to enable real-time AI-powered generation of monetizable insights and privacy-compliant data that could be used for training new AI models. And that's not even the full limit: AI can also do things like monitoring the wear of electric vehicle batteries, helping more of them to make it to repurposing and thus promoting sustainability, with peaq’s blockchain working as the home to digital twins of these batteries. The project is led by Fraunhofer HHI, part of Europe’s largest applied research group, and makes for a promising initiative leveraging AI for the common good.

Peaq’s design and integrations with leading Web3 projects in the AI field such as Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol, make it well-positioned to make use of the technological convergence between AI, Web3, and connected devices. Its tokenomics model rewards users for connecting devices to the network, resulting in extra rewards for DePIN members, which gives the DePINs on peaq a competitive edge against other similar projects. All of this puts peaq at the spearhead of the Web3 push into the real world — a push that will in the long run transform both the blockchain space and the way entire real-world economies function.