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- [00:00]
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- [00:15]
Bill Lakeland
You have incentivization ownership economies community owned real meaningful contributors on a project really helps to amplify what it is that we're building at the core of our technology. When we wrap this blockchain layer around it, we can actually scale like you've never seen before.
- [00:39]
Zion Representative
Imagine a blockchain built for you. No wallets, no keys, no hassle, just innovation. Welcome to ziion, the first walletless layer. One blockchain purpose built for consumer adoption. With ziion, developers can build, launch and scale products that are ready for the masses. No technical barriers for users. Thanks to groundbreaking chain abstraction. All it takes to join the crypto revolution.
- [01:03]
Jen Senasi
An email.
- [01:04]
Zion Representative
Say goodbye to complexity and hello to possibility. Ready to take the leap? Explore zion today@zion.bernt.com we all want to believe in something.
- [01:14]
Consensus Speaker
In Chinese, belief also means trust. We want to trust our systems and each other so we can build a future beyond what we know. Join us at Consensus Hong Kong, where belief becomes real.
- [01:27]
Jen Senasi
Hello and welcome to Markets Daily, hosted by me, Jen Senasi. On this show we navigate the currents shaping the crypto markets, providing insights against the broader financial landscape. So whether you're actively trading or simply fascinated by the volatility of the crypto markets, this show is your compass to understanding what's happened, where we are, and where we're going. On today's show, we're joined by Spexy CEO Bill Lakeland. Bill, hi.
- [01:50]
Bill Lakeland
Hey Jen, great to see you.
- [01:52]
Jen Senasi
Yeah, good to see you too. Now this week, bitcoin hit new all time highs again. I got to ask you, what are you watching? What are you making of this insane momentum that keeps building as we head to 2025?
- [02:05]
Bill Lakeland
Yeah, I mean, you're right, it's pretty insane. I mean, I'm trying to, trying to remain calm and do what I do best, which is, you know, building a business. So I'm trying to stay focused on that. But I'm seeing a real sort of stabilization happening right now. I try to remain fairly macro in general, so watching for kind of balance and stability in the markets is really what I'm looking for as a move into 2025 because we're looking to decentralize our technology kind of into a less choppy kind of crypto environment. So pretty excited about what we're seeing right now, obviously, Bitcoin, Ethereum are kind of the gold standard to watch there, and it's pretty wild to see what's happening. But also other deepen projects, so the decentralized physical infrastructure networks and AI and compute protocols as well, because we're kind of moving more closely aligned with those.
- [02:51]
Jen Senasi
I know you just raised $11.5 million Series A round. I imagine you started this round probably before we hit this very bullish time. But talk to me about interacting with investors. Has their sentiment shifted at all as we head into. Into what seems like it's going to be a very bullish 2025? Does it feel different than before?
- [03:15]
Bill Lakeland
Well, there's definitely a transition. I'd say cautious optimism is definitely occurring right now. I mean, we are raising, of course, before the election, we were raising in the summer, which is always traditionally a tough time to raise because a lot of folks are off traveling, minds are on different things. So it was sort of a bit of a challenging time. And in the summer we didn't quite know what was going to happen and if things were going to stabilize or not, where things are going. So it was a little bit of. It was actually a tricky time to be raising. So I think that speaks a lot for our project and what it is that we're doing. The value that we can bring with the data, we're capturing this kind of global image layer that we're bringing to everybody to be able to lay our AI applications on top of for smarter business and smarter use cases. It sort of speaks volumes to what it is that we're doing for us to be able to get a decent raise, a really great Series A with a great team behind us, you know, in this period of time. And we sort of closed right at this transition point. We closed it off right at the point where it's like, hey, now we're actually seeing solid guardrails and tracks to align on with crypto moving in 2025. So we're kind of in a place now where we can scale and grow quickly and confidently.
- [04:29]
Jen Senasi
Let's talk about Deepin for a second. That was really one of the big narratives of this year. I imagine that continuing into 2025, we've talked to a few different Deepin projects on CoinDesk Helium. Talk to me a little bit about the Deepin narrative. How are investors or the VCs that you've talked to, how are they looking at it and how do you expect it to progress over the next 12, 18 months?
- [04:54]
Bill Lakeland
Yeah, well, I mean, blockchain, you know is, is it's here to stay. I mean we're, we're fully, fully into it and, and sort of enabling real businesses to scale faster and accelerate, you know, especially supply sides of their networks because they're usually two sided networks. Being able to accelerate, well, actually both sides of the networks is what is really exciting about a crypto enabled marketplace. When you have incentivization ownership economies, community owned, real meaningful contributors behind a project really helps to amplify what it is that we're building at the core of our technology. When we wrap this blockchain layer around it, we can actually scale like you've never seen before. And other deepin projects have proven that over in more tumultuous crypto environments. And so now seeing crypto really coming into to give solid foundations for business to build on and scale on, I think we're going to see as we're kind of moving into the next year or so, some of these deep in projects bringing real business to the world through a crypto enabled environment I think is going to really shine brightly. And so I'm really excited to be a part of that. That story. Spec C is a little bit more effort and so it's really interesting how we leverage drone pilots who have a huge amount of passion to fly drones. They bought them for a reason, they want to fly them. And we create this really cool, fun and interesting way for them to go out and actually earn as well as just fly for being hobbyists. So it's kind of this really amazing sweet spot we're finding with our pilot network to incentivize them and be able to capture cities and urban areas at a rate, you know, unheard of. Like you can't do that with airplanes and satellites at the speed that we're doing with drones. So it's quite remarkable to actually see this network come to life.
- [06:43]
Jen Senasi
Well, let's talk about that a little bit more. You're building this fly to earn network. Talk to me about what fly to earn means. If I think about, you know, some of the X to learn things we've seen in the past, that's like, you know, you do something and you earn a token. Is that, is that what's happening?
- [06:58]
Bill Lakeland
Yeah, I mean that is it. The X to earn is not new. It's been around for a while, but it's really what it is that we're doing. And a res resonates with the pilot community who may not be web three based groups. Right. Like a lot of them are web two people. This is New to them. So a Fly to Earn really actually speaks to what it is. They're literally flying the drone and being able to earn. And so, you know, Fly to Earn for us is our incentive model that rewards, you know, drone enthusiasts and pilots to collect imagery to do their passion flying drones and collect imagery by participating in our network through automated missions. Essentially, you know, pilots will show up. They fly an area that has a predetermined flight path. Everything is completely autonomous. So the drone flies itself through our. Through the technology that we've developed. And pilots can, you know, ride their bike scooter around, you know, while they're. While they're. While they're working to collect more specsagons. And they can earn while completing a city and flying your backyard or in your local community. It's really a. An amazing method to be able to capture really quickly. So it's exciting to see.
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Jen Senasi
Okay, and then take me through the next part of the journey.
- [08:08]
Bill Lakeland
So they're basically. They're flying completely automated. They're uploading the imagery we actually created. There's some blockchain technology to help solve a problem with which we call proof of capture. So being able to authenticate the data sets, our software controls the drone completely, so even the camera, the time of day, so they can't fly it in the evening. At night, when it's dark, all these sort of things are baked into the system. So it's kind of like there's leaderboards in there, There's a bunch of sort of gamification processes to make it fun and exciting, as well as obviously being paid for their work. But actually, after the flights, they upload the data, it goes through our proof of capture sort of blockchain system to authenticate, and they essentially get paid and they continue. So pilots, you know, they can fly. Some of the pilots are earning up to 500 to $1,000 a day right now on Fiat, which we will be converting into a token this next summer. But that's a huge amount of utility that they're able to get out of the system. So being able to do things like reserving and staking in the future and a bunch of other ways to be able to add utility and value to the pilots and the pilot experience. And sort of gamifying some of this more interestingly are other ways that we'll just sort of add utility and sort of fun components to what it is that we're doing.
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Zion Representative
Who are the buyers of this imagery.
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Jen Senasi
And maybe tell us a little bit more about the problem that this Is solving.
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Bill Lakeland
Yeah, I mean, the buyers, I mean, this is the exciting part because there's been a traditional set of buyers for this type of data. Mostly, you know, governments, large enterprises that use Google Earth type imagery for business operations, cities for smart city applications. You know, cities want to monitor change. They want to monitor the trees, you know, the condition of the sidewalks, you know, building, building permitting. There's, there's just thousands and thousands of use cases, traditionally what are being used. But because we're leveraging drones, we're actually able to fly at a higher resolution than what you can get out of satellites and airplanes. And we can also fly more frequently, meaning we can task pilots in an on demand way to update smaller areas of cities very, very quickly, as in like the same day, which is unheard of in the satellite and aircraft space.
- [10:16]
Jen Senasi
All right, as we wrap up here, talk to me about maybe the average drone pilot who's participated in this. How much money are they making for participating and contributing to a spike, see ecosystem and product?
- [10:30]
Bill Lakeland
Well, it actually kind of blew my socks off to see what some of the pilots were actually making. And so I don't want to point out specifically, but there are definitely pilots that are earning over 500 a day doing this type of work currently. That's under the current incentives. That's with. We've just launched our beta the last April and we've flown over 50,000 of these hexes that I just spoke about that is like each one of those is an individual drone flight. So we're, you know, the mid 50,000 flights already since then. And we're, you know, we're paying, you know, this low figure fiat dollars per hex right now, but it's only a five minute flight and pilots will collect, you know, 100 of these a day, you know, if they're, if they get really good and efficient at it. So there's definitely an opportunity to earn and there's definitely opportunity to turn your passion into something fun and exciting.
- [11:24]
Jen Senasi
Bill, thank you so much for joining the show. It was a pleasure.
- [11:28]
Bill Lakeland
Absolutely great to meet you, Jen.
- [11:30]
Jen Senasi
And thank you to our audience for watching markets daily. If you enjoy watching markets daily, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Give us a thumbs up and leave a comment if you prefer to listen. We are on the Coindesk podcast network that is available on all podcast platforms. Subscribe. Give us a star rating. We prefer 5. Thank you for watching, thank you for listening and we'll see you tomorrow.