XYO Network building a cryptographic location network

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from a vention do for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have eric Sabarsky and graham McBain from xyo network welcome to the show guys it's a pleasure to have you here thank you thank you so much for taking the time Eric I'm really looking forward to hearing about xyo networks how you guys are disrupting the

0:23blockchain industry and integrating into the real world so if you would just tell us a little bit about the company absolutely so xyo network is connecting blockchain with the real world and what i mean by that is typically smart contracts on etherium or any other smart contract platform i've needed some sort of piece of data to activate and this data is typically something online

0:46something that's not tangible but we're changing that and we're making it so that these smart contracts can be initiated by real world events real things that you can tangibly see or do in the real world and have that automatically verified online so that you could have trustless real world interactions automatically creating exchanges on block chains and on top of

1:11that we are also using this technology to do geolocation and other sorts of things proof of interaction in the real world and also having that in the blockchain so it's really cool exciting stuff that sounds awesome yeah I heard a lot about the location networks that you guys are doing one thing that comes to mind with me is playing more futuristic games like AR

1:33and VR games that use geolocation as well such as like ingress Pokemon go is this something that you guys are able to connect into and tap into the real world to help these games better or is it actually expand way past games yeah you know we're actually using games as our proof of concept with something like this and when the world is starting to be controlled more and more by smart

1:59contracts you're gonna want a really robust system and something that's that's really secure and so instead of us going straight for something you know mission-critical like maybe airplane supply chain logistics we've thought maybe that a safer place to start might have been so absolutely Pokemon go we're going after something like that actually this

2:17past weekend over a hundred people at our conference played our Pokemon go style game and they walked around and collect checked in a bunch of different places in order to earn a non-functional token and we're actually pretty sure that might be the first time that over a hundred people have worked actually done physical work in the real world in order to earn a non fungible

2:36token so we're pretty excited about where this is going yeah absolutely and one of the big advantages this whole AR gaming has on top of our network is it's a verifiably provable location so the reason you couldn't really monetize things like Pokemon go is because it was really easy to spoof your location and catch all the Pokemon on the other side of the world

2:56from your couch it wasn't hard to do but if it was built on something like our network you couldn't lie about your location it's verifiably provable where you at least the general area you are and you can't have hacking like that yeah for sure so with these block chains you know they're supposed to be trustless and one of the trust issues with Pokemon Go is that you have to the

3:18game has to trust that we're not spoofing our location we are where we say we are and there were we're playing legitimately so how are you guys incorporating that trust factor into the platform yeah so incorporating the trust it's actually it's really sort of inherent to the way that the network verifies origin and so the idea is that you often won't lie to yourself and so

3:48every device that's in our network is gonna be keeping track of its own history and then it'll be doing what we call a bound witness or a handshake with every other device that it comes across and so what that does is the more and more handshakes that are that a given device has the higher and higher the probability that they are where they say they are or more likely or where they

4:07came from in our case so we're not acting as a trusted Authority we're trying to set up mechanisms in which people will be most incentivized if they behaved most truthfully and Erica is the one who actually designing those algorithms so you don't a lot better than I would exactly can you guys hear me just fine so yep yep yep you're back okay so yeah the idea behind it is we have

4:29this protocol called a bound witness protocol and it is exactly what it sounds like it's a witness protocol where actually no one is just explicitly stating a fact like I am at this location or anything like that and people have to trust it's more other people are witnessing people at other locations and it's agreed upon by everyone seeing it happen that is

4:49actually true so it's less of a statement and more of witnesses confirming what you're doing okay I also read that you guys are incorporating hardware into it or you have these location beacons that help verify the network can you explain how these help and are they necessary yeah absolutely so X Y o has existed as a company actually for a few years now since 2012

5:14as a fine doubles company so our main product has been a little hexagon shape that you can attach on your keychains and through our app it can tell you where your keys are and if they're far away or not so we've sold a million of those devices they're out there being used for that purpose but with a quick firmware update that one cxy our network is officially

5:33launched they can all be sentinels in our network and they could all be mining cryptocurrency by having these Bluetooth interactions with everything around them verifying their own location and everyone else's location around them so we hope to keep selling that hardware and really introduce hardware into this whole blockchain of things that's awesome yeah it's always great to have a

5:53hardware piece it really solidifies brings extra force to the platform so Graham you guys are storing a lot of stuff on the blockchain does xyo Networks need its own blockchain or do you guys just back on like the ethereum blockchain and do you need a coin to run on xyo network yeah great questions so really xyo network is position moral of what's called is this emerging term

6:21of a middleware protocol and so what that means is that we're a service that any more contract platform or any chain can actually use when it needs to verify location data and so the question about our token there really be two ways that the x-pyr network is used and in this case the public network would a token and so what will happen is all these devices are out there shaking

6:44hands and showing where they were and then as that data gets stored if you is a smart contract want to access did this person go here was this package delivered you have to pay for that request and the xyo network then sort of compensates all the people that helped gather store and transmit that data so yes there's a token involved and yes it is a public network okay great so

7:09you mentioned that xyo network has been running as an existing business for many years now but I'm guessing you more recently incorporated blockchain technology at what stage of this development are you guys at and how long have you been working on the blockchain part four so we started working on the blockchain early this year around January time and really started getting

7:32things together in around March April May and then really picked up this summer so it's just didn't been in the past year that we've started this whole blockchain things and just this past weekend we had our first annual conference called spatial and at it we actually had our first demonstration of the live network going from start to finish and basically the demo we had

7:53with everyone in the audience is really cool to see is we put one of our Sentinel beacons on a drone and we had another Sentinel beacon onstage with our CEO and then we flew a drone a crop over the audience is a little dangerous but I was driving it so it was okay we flew the drone over the people once the drone interacted with the thing on stage we

8:16had basically the interaction get recorded stored on our network accessed by a smart contract to initiate a transfer of aetherium from one account to another and you could see on stage everyone saw the etherium transfer right when the drone got on stage and it was the first live action of our network for everyone to see it was really cool so for just getting started from here and

8:37it's got to be uphill yeah that sounds great I love the drone you know featuring that actually makes it really exciting so it sounds like you guys have done a lot you know just this year alone what are the plans in the next six months in one year for X Y our networks do you guys have big plans for 2019 definitely the air can talk more to the actual xyo network site itself I can

9:01talk about the what we're doing as far as testing the network that game that I spoke about the scavenger hunt game our next focus over the next year for me anyway from the developer site is to get in front of more developers and get them playing with that game and get them playing with other use cases that we can make really easy for them to become part

9:18of the network so we're really excited at the conference a lot of our the people that were attending had really great ideas of how to use that game one guy is part of a club that does cross-country motorcycle races that go for they ride upwards of a thousand miles a day and currently they're using really antiquated ways to check that people got to all those points on earth

9:37and they're really excited to incorporate xyo and the app that we've built so I'm really focused on getting people in that but Eric could tell you a lot more about the network and where we're at with that yeah absolutely our big goal for 2019 is just getting these beacons everywhere across the world because they really are almost useless without interacting with other

9:55beacons around them so we want these beacons to be everywhere and as many places as possible and another big thing we just announced yesterday actually officially is we're partnering with a satellite company named global star and we're gonna launch a network of satellite communicating beacons that are also able to communicate with its satellites and then it's all greatly

10:18work of sentinels and also improve our geolocation features so those are the two big things is getting our sentinels everywhere on the surface of the earth and everywhere in space wow that's really exciting so as well just to touched a little bit on the token that you mentioned are you guys doing an upcoming token sale or what's the situation with the X Y o token yeah

10:40that's that's a really great question so right now the X Y o token is only available if you're from us if you are a credit investor or overseas investor and so you know we Eric and I are really on the development side and xyo does a really good job of insulating us from pressures around the token price we're really focused on building great technology making sure that it works and

11:00we've got a whole other team that's that worries about that stuff so sadly we're not the right guys for that but if you'd like to know boring technical stuff awesome hey development is key to growth and mainstream adoptions so I'm glad that you guys are working hard and you're able to focus so yeah looking forward to your roadmap you have a lot of these

11:20milestones you're looking to hit what kind of limitations do you expect you know might come along the way 4xy our networks sure yeah I think one of the big limitations is as I said before we need these beacons to be in as many places as possible and have as many people using them otherwise it really has no point so I think the biggest hurdle that we have to overcome is mass

11:42adoption we need these things to be used by businesses by delivery men we need these things to be used by pretty much every reasonable application they need to be a part of otherwise the all this awesome tech we're building isn't really gonna get used the way it should be definitely you know getting that hardware out are you guys distributing it throughout America or is it a

12:05worldwide effort it's very much a worldwide effort and right now what we're really focused on is finding existing channels that already have compatible devices in the field and seeing if there's ways that we can add value so we've noticed a few systems such as like electronic logging devices on commercial trucks that kind of thing where there's services that people

12:27have to pay for that log data about their their transversing in the world well that's a perfect use case for xyo to actually lower that cost for those people well while adding more value so we're really looking for high-value opportunities for us to be able to include our software existing devices because we recognize that deploying our own devices is one strategy but

12:47co-opting existing networks is a much faster way to gain mass adoption definitely definitely that's great so from the venture capitalists side I'm sure there's a lot of viewers that are interested in this on our Channel what would you say is the profit model for xyo networks as you as as you guys expand and develop a profitable business yes we've really got two ways of

13:13thinking about that and a lot of it is to think about it more like an open source company so the public network that creating is really more to serve as a public utility right so for open contracts and open networks that want to be able to call it should be a pretty open system and then we as xyo will benefit by holding that you know again I'm not they purposely don't make

13:36us have to learn all that stuff but from a more traditional revenue standpoint there's gonna be a lot of companies that don't want to participate in the public network and so we'll really be focusing on helping those internal corporations maybe even government set up their own private networks and then there'll be a there'll be a you know enterprise charge

13:53for that so that'll look a lot like a Red Hat model which what their recent IBM acquisition has proven to be a pretty pretty solid idea so that's where we're focusing definitely that was huge news awesome Thank You Graham so if people are looking to get involved in participating in X Y o network helping with the development what's the best way to contact the team and get involved

14:14with the community absolutely all our contact info is found at our website X Y o dot Network you could always feel free to reach out with any questions right on the contact page people get back to you real quick on that and if you want to get involved soon you can buy our mining mining kits that'll come with a bunch of hardware beacons and bridges and to find out what

14:39more those devices do check out our website also and also download our apps as they come out right now there is a beta tested version on Android and an iOS one to come soon so as these products and these apps come out just download them and play around with them that's awesome yeah I'll leave the links to your website and to the apps in the description box below and that's all the

15:02time we have for now but I really appreciate you guys taking the time Eric and gram I'm looking forward to seeing how X Y o networks develops in the coming months let's do another interview where we can see how the company is flourishing at the start of 2019 so thank you so much that's great thank you so much for the time we really appreciate being on the show and enjoyed

15:20getting to meet you in person hopefully we're good to see it a lot more events next year thank you so much Eric Ram see guys thank you thank you