Bringing Machines Into the Future of Web3 with Leo

What is up guys welcome back to their episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. And today I am joined by Leonard, the co-founder of Peak. How's it going today Leonard? It's going great. A lot going on recently in the past weeks. A lot of developments happened. And I mean, it's a eave merch day, right? So a big big thing happened that was anticipated for many years in

the space. So it's a great day. Yeah, totally agree. And when we're recording this on the eave merch day and arguably the biggest event in crypto to date, I would argue. And I think a lot of people would agree with that. But before we get into peak and learn a little bit about what you guys are building, let's hear your origin story. How did you get

into, you know, crypto slash web 3? Yeah, so actually one of my co-founder still he introduced me back in 2016. I was in Berlin. He was also coming to Berlin and you got introduced by another friend to Ethereum actually back then also not to Bitcoin first. Yeah. And so I got introduced to Ethereum back in 2016 and was just fascinated by the possibility to run applications

in a decentralized way. Without central parties involved. And yeah, what then happened is I was studying business and informatics at the time. So I had like a technical background with also business background. And I basically, yeah, fell down the rabbit hole and never looked back since then. So I was working on early projects and the Berlin ecosystem, which was very active for lots of people from

Ethereum were here. Here, parity was founded and built here. And yeah, so I used to be in early meetups in the space. And we very early on saw that this technology as tremendous real world potential as well. Not just, yeah, let's say on the financial side, but also in the field of mobility or IoT. And basically started working towards that direction. And that's how I entered

the space. I was half a year from getting to know the technology to kind of going full time. So pretty quickly. Cool. Very cool. Yeah. And that was what I was really excited to dig into. Is this sort of IoT connection to real world assets and whatnot. But let's kind of start with a high level as to what peak is trying to do. And what stage

you guys are at and then we can unpack sort of IoT and all that. Yes, for sure. Sounds great. So on the very high level, our all long term vision is to build what we call the economy of things or it could be also called the machine economy. So the smarter machines get and the more autonomous, the more they will be able to interact with each

other and with humans and kind of become economic agents like not autonomous vehicle, for example. And a couple of years, they will drive around and get paid. And if they are driving people around, then they go to a charging station and they charge energy. And there's no human involved. So it's really that age of automation, which is approaching. And in order for that to work effectively,

Web 2 is not not good because you need all of those things and people to kind of be registered in an open system where they can see each other and transact with each other. Because if you try to do that in Web 2, you have all those world gardens, closed systems, like the things are registered on different platforms. They just can't see each other. Humans have

identities at Facebook, at Google, whatsoever. So those identities are also platform specific. And you need a deal. You need an open Web 3 ecosystem where you have the sovereign identities that are visible to everyone. And you need the business logic. So these things and people can transact with each other. And we're building exactly that infrastructure. It's in the Polkadot ecosystem, like a Leia 1 blockchain, which

exactly enables machines and humans to interact and transact with each other without going through middlemen. And like another tangible use case would be, for example, decentralized right hailing or like a decentralized Uber, where in the future people can just book rights without having to go. Through a central platform. And yeah, our long term vision on why we do that is because we also see, like the

value distribution needs to be adjusted. Because if we have an age of automation and all the work is done, a lot of work is done by machines. It's the question, who's getting all that money, who's getting all that value. Is it a few big companies that own that machine economy kind of? And, we thought that this wouldn't be a good future. And so we much rather

prefer a future where everyone can participate in that machine economy. And value is being distributed in a more democratic way. And yeah, Web 3 is perfect for that. And that's kind of like the greater societal impact we're working towards. Nice. Nice. And I wanted to kind of dig in a little bit on the Polkadot side of things. I know that sort of the chain that you

guys have really focused on or parachene. And I'd love to kind of dig into that and the interoperability side of things. Could you kind of walk us through the machine economy with what that does with Polkadot? Yeah, sure. Of course. So yeah, we decided to build an apocalyptic system because I mean substrate is a really good blockchain framework to build your own layer one. That is

in the ecosystem, the Polkadot ecosystem. And of course, like you mentioned before, the topic of interoperability. What we're building will not work just by itself. There needs to be interoperability to all kinds of other networks. We need to be able to kind of consume services from other networks in Polkadot and beyond, right? The true Web 3 vision is that, right? All those layer one networks kind

of get connected and interoperability is possible. And in fact, we're actually working on that also in the industry context, which we can dive into. And then we're going to have a little bit. Yeah, but interoperability is super key to our vision because our vision doesn't work. Just we cannot have everything on one on our network that that will not work there. It needs to interact, for

example, energy, right? Energy is super crucial to what we're doing. But there are other networks that focus on energy on the energy market much more. And we need to be able to interact on the peak network needs to be able to interact with those energy networks. In order for the machine economy to function. So there was another big reason to choose Polkadot. Nice. Very cool. Now

let's dive into the machine economy. I think for everybody listening, that can be a little daunting. Just mainly even the word machine because it's so broad. And I want to kind of unpack that real quick because a lot of people out there are familiar with the phrase, app and DeFi and yield. And FTs and things like that. But when we when we loop in machines into

all of this, if you can walk us through an example of how all of this in your scenario works. Yes, for sure. And it is a very, I have to say, it is really looking into the future. And there's a lot of work to be done. And the machine economy will not happen from from today to tomorrow. It's going to be like a decade long process.

And to an example, and maybe to go back to what I said before, I think autonomous vehicles are a really, really great example because it's tangible. They already exist. They kind of lack permission to be autonomous so far. But that will happen in the next couple of years. And you could imagine, for example, a Tesla that is how Elon Musk called it a robot taxi. It's

it's driving around all day long. And it's just, you know, driving people from A to B without any human involved. And so this Tesla then in the machine economy, where three machine economy can get paid, it has its own wallet and it gets directly paid by the people it drives around. So before someone enters the Tesla, they have to deposit a certain amount of money and

tokens. For example, and after the ride is done, the car receives that money and has made revenue. And then like after a couple of hours driving around, the car is out of energy. So the car drives to a charging station. And it actually, yeah, connect with the charging station or the charging station connects to the Tesla. And then the Tesla pays again the deposit and gets

energy and is being being charged. And all of that happens peer to peer directly on the ledger. The charging station has an identity. A sovereign identity on the on the peak network. The car is a sovereign identity on the peak network. The person before had a sovereign identity on the peak network or another network. And then can and all those transactions happen without any central platforms

facilitating them. Then later on, for example, there's a toll road and the car wants to pass the toll road to drive somewhere. And it pays the toll road directly peer to peer from the car wallet without any human or any bank account being involved. Same for parking slot, for example. You could just the car can just pay for parking slots and without any human, any credit

account, nothing being involved. So those are like more selling and buying of goods and services. But then also the car is constantly collecting data. For example, valuable data's road damage detects where there's road damage when it drives around. And then the car can go and sell this data to the government, for example, to the cities, giving the city clear information on here. There's damage on the

street. You need to repair the street. So and that data can be sold again in a peer to peer way without central intermediaries. And when it comes to ownership going forward, it doesn't necessarily have to be one person that owns that Tesla. It could be 10 or 100 people that pulled money and invested into the Tesla. And and basically the returns. The Tesla is generating on

being a robot taxi, our split between all the people who owned it. And that ownership can be represented in form of NFTs or an NFT. So yeah, this is like a more tangible example of what we imagine as the machine economy, the emerging. And as automation increases, drones will be delivering things in micro mobility and so on and so on. All there are so many use

cases where these machines need to become their own economic agents and really transact with their environment directly and freely without having to go through AWS, Google or any other big platform. But really are able to get into that with all intermediaries. Got it. Got it. Yeah, that's that's kind of a mind bending thought of the Tesla that's owned by a group of people that is a

robot taxi and they're splitting profits in the future of that taxi. I think that that is quite quite interesting. And just to kind of reel it back to where you are today, what stage is peak at? And you know, how do you see this sort of actually transpiring over the next five years, 10 years, how far away are we from something like what you're describing? Yeah,

absolutely. Yeah. So where we are at right now is we have a fully functional test net up and running. So these applications can already be built and tested. There's one application for the peer to peer electric vehicle charging, for example, already on the network. Another one got recently built by students of the technical University of Munich for decentralized parking. Right. Of course, those are like concepts

and it's getting started. But we can today already prove that these things are possible and doable. So that that is up and running there. We're also preparing to become a par chain on Kusama and Polkadot. So to really connect to those networks. And one really exciting thing is just yesterday. We announced that we are part of like a 20 million plus consortium, which is backed by

the European Union. And that's led by Bosch as a company. There are other big players like Airbus, Continental, Denzel, part of it. And many more great Web 3 projects, such as Ocean Protocol. And we together work on actually establishing exactly what I just talked about. This infrastructure based on Web 3. And we have a lot of mobility in Europe. And it's like we have government backing,

big enterprises are on board, universities are on board. And this is really, really great to see because it's not just a vision anymore. We're having, but we have actually a really powerful group of companies, universities and other Web 3 projects that are working towards making this happen. And we have government officials on the highest levels in the EU that are supporting it. And that who understood.

That this makes sense. And this is a better future than if all of this were run on Web 2. So that is very exciting. We're making like real progress there. And I said before, from a technical point of view, all of those things can be already built. But I would say the biggest challenge is usability, right? User experience to really get people to use those applications

in a scalable way. There's quite some work to do to make it really feasible and easy to use. Because as of now, as you know, Web 3 is not the most user friendly space. And you need to be quite technical and knowledgeable to handle your own wallet, for example. And this is not yet where the mainstream is. So I would say until those applications really take

off and gain more and more traction. Like the first ones that will take a few more years. But yeah, a lot of stuff is happening. And I see great breakthroughs coming. And the promise of IoT plus blockchain, everyone knows it's a great match. And it's been talked about since five years already, at least. No one really has cracked it yet because they're great challenges in terms

of usability and integrating with those real world machines. But I could well imagine that the in the next ball run. And yeah, the next cycle of hype that those real world cases will play a big crucial role. And yeah, we're getting ready to really deliver on that. Very cool. Very cool. So taking a step aside from what you guys are building. What is it that gets

you excited in the morning? When you wake up, you're checking your phone and outside of peak. What is it that you're just super hyped about? Yeah, when I'm excited about it. The general is really being able to follow my purpose and have meaningful work. Like in peak itself. What excites me beyond peak is consciousness and human consciousness. So I'm very much into meditation. There's a spiritual

side to me. And I really think that when we elevate human consciousness together. And that's the best way to create a better world. And while doing that, also all of us working on projects, on things, on technologies that actually support a transition to a better society on all levels. And I think when I look back the like 50, 60 years, we've made tremendous progress. And there's

so much progress to be made. But yeah, it excites me. I think even though a lot of things don't look so good at the moment. I think we're moving in a great direct. And I'm very excited to be able to contribute and have many friends who are working on great, important projects that help climate change or solve other problems. And spending time with them and being

on this entrepreneurial journey. I would say it's what excites me most every day. Well said. Well said. Well, those are all the questions that I have for you. Where can people go and learn more about peak? So yeah, this our Twitter page. Which is great to get all updates. Our Discord channel to engage and be in touch. I think those are probably the best places. Then

on the website on our blog. There's there's more detailed information. But I guess for the community, Twitter and Discord are the best places to go. Okay, excellent. Wherever you guys are listening on iTunes or Spotify, all the links that Leonard mentioned will be in these show notes. But thank you so much for coming on and sharing everything that is peak. Leonard. Yeah, thanks a lot for

having me. It's been a great pleasure.