Bankless Times talked to Leonard Dorloechter, co-founder of peaq, about a future where everyone gets to benefit from automation.
Why did you decide to found peaq?
The idea behind peaq goes back to the mid-2010s, as the nascent Web3 space was only awakening to its own full potential. Me and peaq’s other co-founders saw it as nothing short of a tectonic shift, the ultimate paradigm change in the making — a technology that gives control back to the people. At the same time, we already saw automation squeezing the job market as machines were growing smarter by the day.
There is no stopping progress, so we saw the answer elsewhere: in enabling people to own these machines and profit from the value that they create. Blockchain was the perfect tool for that, but someone had to build the blockchain fine-tuned for smart machines generating real-world value… And that’s how peaq came to be.
peaq’s vision video describes the ecosystem as “The Internet of Things meets Web3.” Isn’t that a very ambitious goal?
Oh, that’s the least ambitious part! Transforming the very foundations of how we manage and earn from connected machines, that’s more of a challenge. But the tide is right — Web3 is pivoting toward the real world with the rise of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs). These are projects that use tokens as the incentive for communities to run hardware providing real-world services, such as electric vehicle charging, data collection, and more. DePINs have been around for a while, but they are now in the spotlight, and they are exactly what peaq was built to power.
On peaq, machines turn into dynamic real-world assets (RWAs) producing value for the community, and I am happy to share that there will be multiple options for businesses and communities to tap the DePIN model through the RWA tokenization platforms on peaq. Playing into all this is another current trend, the AI boom. AI enables machines to become even smarter and function as independent economic agents, creating value for their owners. The DePIN model enables communities to co-own smart machines and share the revenues that they generate.
peaq has overtaken both Polygon and Solana in the number of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs). How do DePINs incentivize users to build real infrastructure networks?
peaq offers DePIN builders a wide variety of benefits resulting from peaq’s own core design being laser-focused on real-world applications. peaq’s economic model rewards directly lets DePINs participate in peaq’s network revenue. peaq also grants builders a variety of modular DePIN functions, building blocks that projects can tap to cut the development time. These include multi-chain machine IDs, payments, and role-based access control.
On top of that, peaq recently unveiled its data verification framework, which aims at solving one of the hardest challenges for the sector: ensuring DePIN data integrity and security. Besides, there is also an Ecosystem Grant Program that builders can apply to and receive funding, investor intros, developer assistance, and more. Where relevant, projects also get introductions with peaq’s enterprise partners as well as collaborations such as the Bosch-led Gaia-X moveID project. So there’s a very wide array of incentives, and there will be more and more as we’re working to make peaq the ultimate home of DePINs.
What is the most practical use case of peaq?
There’s quite a few projects already building on peaq, as you just mentioned, and it would be unfair to highlight one over the others. peaq is open to builders working on anything real-world, there is no favoritism or gatekeeping. The projects already building on peaq work in such areas as shared mobility, data collection, Web access, machine real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, electric vehicle charging, Web3 smart homes, and more. There is always room for more, and there are more exciting developments in the future.
How does generating wind and solar energy on peaq work?
Well, hypothetically speaking, a DePIN could tokenize a solar panel or a wind turbine through ELOOP’s tokenization platform to raise funds for its purchase and setup. As far as greentech goes, though, the projects currently building on peaq are more focused on Web3 carbon credits and tokenizing green energy RWAs such as storage batteries. In both cases, this involves using multi-chain peaq IDs to handle the data aspects and the transactions and leveraging smart contracts to power the underlying business logic.
The ecosystem promises to give people back power over their devices. Have we really lost control to that extent?
We have indeed — ownership is slowly eroding today, for a variety of reasons, from economic strain resulting in more rent and subscription services to things like copyright laws and manufacturers’ terms of services that dictate what we can and cannot do with the smart devices we’ve purchased.
At the same time, though, the rise of Web3 makes for a one-of-a-kind opportunity to turn the tide and make things right. Web3 enables people to own things via the Internet, with no intermediaries, on open and transparent protocols. When applied to our devices, this paradigm is all about giving control back to the people — and that’s what peaq is doing.
If left unchecked, what can this lack of control lead to?
Well, in the scope of a few next years, it will be more of the same, but on steroids. More smart devices in your house sending more data to Big Tech companies, letting them get to know you even better and thoroughly monetize this knowledge while compromising your privacy. In the longer run, though, consider this: AI has already made dents in the job market. As the technology matures and gets integrated in more devices, the process will continue, expanding into new fields and spheres. This process may result in widespread unemployment, with all the profits from smart machines creating more and more value concentrated in the hands of Big Tech.
peaq offers an alternative to this future — a future of co-ownership through tokenization, a future where everyone gets to benefit from automation. The more jobs machines take, the more humans earn — that’s the equation we want the future to be based on.
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