Nodle Official Community AMA / Q&A w/ Co-Founders Micha Benoliel & Garrett Kinsman

40 min readAug 6, 2021

In our first Official Community AMA, Nodle Co-founders Micha Benoliel & Garrett Kinsman answer questions from the community covering the topics of Nodle’s competitive advantages, what’s in store for the future, technical updates, and resolutions, and much more!

TL;DR Highlights:

The team is working with a provider of 4G / 5G solutions to provide more people access to LTE cellular. [Announcement coming soon] (skip to :40)
Addressing the recent unexpected boost in rewards and what transpired (skip to 1:40)
Nodle vs. Helium (skip to 4:52)
Nodle will announce a partnership with sensor providers where Nodle Cash users will be notified if they’re in proximity to the sensor, and the NODL reward will be higher than for other traditional sensors. (skip to 31:18)
The NEW Nodle Cash app—a first look at the UI is expected later this month—will re-introduce MISSIONS by September, where a user is prompted to do something and gets rewarded for it in Nodle Cash. (skip to 39:09)
Hear latest on our goal of securing a Polkadot Parachain slot (skip to 47:44)
Micha hints at a partnership announcement with Ledger, the hardware wallet (skip to 1:02:17)
Nodle is HIRING. We plan to reach approximately 45 employees in the next two months. If you know someone who likes scaling infrastructure and believes in user privacy, we’re offering 100 NODL per qualified candidate referral + 10,000 NODL for a successful hire. Those interested can send their CV to people@nodle.co or and/or visit our Current Job Openings. Please make sure your name gets mentioned in the application process to receive credit.

Nodle AMA Transcription

0:00 (already in progress) Micha Benoliel (MB), CEO/Co-Founder, Nodle
“…Into our apps and that’s how everything started with Nodle.

We deployed with a few app developers. We launched the first app on the HTC phone—the first blockchain phone—the Exodus. That was the first version of the Nodle Cash App. And we saw a lot of traction. We quickly reached more than 5 million daily active nodes on this network. So the cryptocurrency was really the way to drive and build these economies. We believe it’s just the beginning. Today, we apply this to Bluetooth, because more than 50% of all IoT devices use Bluetooth. We already have in the [works], working with a provider of 4G or 5G solutions, and we believe that this will be applied soon to provide access to LTE cellular.

0:57 Garrett Kinsman (GK), Co-Founder/VP Sales & Growth, Nodle
Yeah, it’s really interesting if you look at all radio protocols. They’re quickly becoming software-defined. So we look at how do you build a platform that makes it really easy to deploy these protocols? And maybe the protocol doesn’t even matter? Maybe it’s just an app, quite literally, running on the radio. So how do you take a wireless network and build apps into it? Build search into it? So it’s a totally radical perspective on how you think about wireless networks. And how do you incentivize their deployment? So Micha, maybe we want to go over the past week, just so we’re clear with everyone, and then take some questions.

1:40 MB
Absolutely. So last week we had a large number of lucky people. Actually close to 19,000. You saw that you all received, if you’re part of these people, more rewards than you probably expected. What happened is, we had a backlog in the way these rewards were distributed. So we launched a process to be able to apply the rewards that were missing to most of the people and accelerate the work process. But while we launched that backlog process to distribute these rewards, what happened is there was basically a bug, which was linked to modifications we made in the way that rewards are distributed. And that caused 19,000 people or a bit less, 18,000 I think 856 people, received more rewards than they should have normally received. We don’t think it’s affecting anything in the crypto mix, because in the end, it’s just basically three days of rewards. So the impact is minimal, I would say, on all of the mining, and the tokens that are allocated for on my end need to be mined and minted. It created excitement among the people who received it. So we think that’s a good thing. But we also take it very seriously, because we don’t want these kinds of things to happen again. And if we decide to reward the community with additional tokens, or bonuses, or for taking an action collectively, which will be introducing soon through missions, then we want to basically be on top of it and decide and know why we are making these rewards and accelerating these rewards. So that’s a little bit about it, maybe Garrett you want to add something?

3:38 GK
Sure. We really just try to do our best to be transparent with any issues that we have. Nodle is still pretty young, even though we’ve been at it for several years. So we’re constantly scaling and constantly building out our team to make sure that these issues don’t happen again. And that we can have a very robust, resilient, and decentralized system ahead. That’s part of the reason we wanted to do this AMA just to make it clear, but also to give you guys the opportunity to ask questions. Daren, I’m thinking if we have people ask their questions verbally, or if we just have them type it in the Nodle chat?

4:19 Daren McKelvey (DM), Director of Communications / Community Growth
I think we can start with some pre-submitted questions. There’s one I’m going to submit here. Hopefully, I can tag the right person it’s j1obigfield. I don’t know if this will work.

4:35 MB
It is our first AMA guys. We are super excited. It’s actually great to have you live and to be able to answer your question live, but we have to do some fine-tuning because it’s the first time we use that tool on Telegram.

4:52 DM
Here we go. The first question, “What are your competitive advantages over similar IoT blockchain projects like Helium and so on?”

5:01 MB
Well umm..

5:02 GK
I can take that.

5:04 MB
I can start and maybe you can add more things. I just want to say a few things. So first, when we started, we were using a blockchain, we are more like a layer two application because we were using Stellar. We quickly saturated the Stellar network by realizing 1.4 million microtransactions a day and that was more than 40% of the whole Stellar network at that time. And we had in mind to actually go on our own chain from the beginning, but we wanted to do it at the right time with the right technology. We found a great opportunity with Polkadot and Substrate and decided to move to Polkadot Substrate. We actually loved the environment, we love the way the administration is in place and the interface to actually manage the chain and the evolution of the chain. And so that was basically a great move that we decided and we think we did very well in doing that. So we think first that being on Substrate and Polkadot is a big competitive advantage. Because we really believe in that ecosystem. We really believe in the interoperability of that ecosystem. And we believe that on the chain, thanks to that interoperability, we’ll be able to use the services produced on the Nodle ecosystem and the Nodle chain.

The second thing I want to highlight is the experience of the team in the space of wireless and communications. We are a very excited team, we are not here to do a one-shot. We’ve been working at this for four years just with Nodle, but it’s a project that Garrett and I have been excited about. And it’s a dream that we have had for, I would say, I know you guys are younger than me but what stands out here is something I really wanted to realize when I was a teenager.

So it’s something that we are here for the long term, we really want to arrive at the point that will bring connectivity for free to people. And we think we have the formula for that.

And that’s also thanks to you and the whole community because without you and without the community, we wouldn’t be able to achieve that. I will let Garrett go into the specifics about the competitive advantages, but I think we have many. Garrett.

7:30 GK
Yeah

I think there’s a lot of interesting things. I mean, the first thing is, we’ve just gone down all the rabbit holes. We have all of the mistakes when deploying wireless networks. But we’ve really seen that if you have to go and deploy physical infrastructure, that’s a big disadvantage. Nodle is a software-only network, so we can deploy a massive wireless network just with software. So as quickly as you can install an app, you can cover an entire country or continent with connectivity. And that’s never been possible before, where you would have to deploy this infrastructure. And the most common infrastructure, the wireless infrastructure around the world is the smartphone that’s right in your pocket. So we think our primary advantage is that we are a software-only network. We can deploy much more quickly, than other types of networks. And with that architecture in mind, we can have Bluetooth as just an app. We can have other wireless protocols like WiFi or LTE that are supported on the phone, as an app. So if the hardware can support it, and our network can support it, as well. So those are really our primary advantages.

If we dig into the weeds a little bit and only focus for a second on this, is if you look at the amount of energy, megabits per milliwatts seconds, that’s required to move a bit of data from a device up to a cloud.

Nodle is the most efficient network in the world from the movement of data in terms of energy in terms of low cost.

So we think that’s massively important and interesting.

So we have another question. This is from TBC_Mandrew. “I’d like to hear the team talk about data product offerings. What kind of data is available to buyers? Data privacy? Use cases for these data buyers?” Micha, I can take this one if you’d like.

9:28 MB
Yes, go ahead. I think we have a few examples. And maybe you can mention the work we already have done with a few big players of the industry in the US when it comes to location tracking and the industrial use case for location tracking of assets. We basically do what Apple does with the Apple tag, but at an industrial level. We’ll touch on the work we are doing with big rapid courier companies.

10:00 GK
The big difference and this is core to our company’s belief is that big tech companies believe they should have a monopoly on your privacy. So if you’re driving through most cities in America these days, there are huge billboards that say X brand, we care about your privacy. They do, but they don’t actually give you control. They take all your data, they keep it very safe and on a big server. Usually, these servers are right across the street from the big government data centers. And we think there’s a better way, we think that if we’re going to connect trillions of things to the internet, this has to be secure.

And I’m not talking, “I keep all your data safe. My little bucket’s secure,” I’m saying real, cryptographic distributed hardware security. That’s the only way that we can ensure a world of a trillion things as well, that we want to live in. That a world of a trillion things isn’t being hacked by nation-states are being back-doored by other governments. Because this can get really messy really fast. So what we do is we believe that users should be in control of their privacy. We even want to push that to the IoT device, I’ll say that IoT devices should have control over their own privacy. So the first thing that we do is protect users. So we don’t associate their identifiers with personal information, like their phone number, or their IMEI, like their phone, we just use the public key. And we’re actually working on ways to basically extract that public key. So even the data that’s hitting our servers is really hard to track back to an individual user. On top of that, if people want to purchase data from our network, they’re only allowed to purchase data from devices that they own. And they have to prove that they own these devices.

So we’re not going to sell a competitor information about another company’s device. That’s just wrong. You have to own your device. And we’re migrating to a space where you have to actually be able to cryptographically prove it. So we’re deploying cryptographic implementations on the IoT device that require you, to prove that you’re the owner of this device. And that’s part of the proof of connectivity. So we respect user privacy, we want to be encrypting IoT traffic at the edge. And so that’s really the core of our beliefs.

Now, we’re also experimenting with what can be done with these massive data sets. So what if you can allow a logistics provider to connect their data to a pallet tracking company? And connect that to maybe an eCommerce company? We think that these network effects between data sources will actually build more value than potentially any other company has generated. You know, Google today is just in the digital world. Nodle is a wireless network, but it’s also essentially a search engine into the physical world. And we’re still grasping what that means or what could be capable with that. But we’re also trying to take a very slow, methodical approach and say, how do we build something that can be extremely valuable, but also do it well, protecting user privacy, because, in the end, we have to make sure this is where we want to live in.

In terms of people that we’re actually working with, we’re in deep discussions with shipping pallet companies. People want to connect shipping pallets, but they can’t because it’s too expensive to use a SIM card. And Bluetooth is really that perfect price point. We’re doing things like the tracking of stolen vehicles. You can basically cover a car with Bluetooth tags and if that gets stolen, or even parts get taken off that car, it’ll show up on our network. We can find that.

So those are some of the use cases that we’re focusing on right now. Micha, I don’t know if you had any other ones that you wanted to add, but just really in the asset tracking space, how we can secure protect user privacy and then enable all kinds of interesting use cases.

Go ahead, Micha.

14:08 MB
I think one important thing that we can mention is the way we want and we think the industry is going. We believe that every item and every device is going to have a microprocessor and a wireless communication interface because the cost of these things is going down. We think that what’s missing is, is actually the simple connectivity layer and architecture to enable all these things at some point to communicate and be able to exchange data. And that’s what we are already building with Nodle. We are building this architecture, which is fully decentralized that is going to fully protect people’s privacy and the privacy of the data of these devices. We want to do that in a very simple manner.

Like today, if you are a manufacturer and you want to join the network, you don’t need to modify your firmware. You just need to comply with the Bluetooth standard and then you can start to use the network to send and receive data. And that’s a big, big, big change and a big improvement compared to the traditional world of the telecommunication industry. And we want that to work for not only Bluetooth, but WiFi, LTE, 4G, 5G, and that’s the way we are building this network. And we think that’s going to make a big, big difference.

15:39 GK
And to Micha’s point there, if you’re in San Francisco, you see self-driving cars driving around. Essentially, the entire world is being mapped in 3D in real-time. If you look at the cost of sensors, a Bluetooth chip today, the unit cost if I’m ordering, millions, is around 40 cents. So that means that I can build an embedded Bluetooth tag with computing, it runs, its own operating system, it has memory as sensors, for less than $1. And that cost is going to decrease, essentially, after almost exponentially, forever. And so in a few years, we’re going to see the entire world not only be digitized but be digitized with sensors and have compute functionality being built into it. You know, we think of us interacting with computers, the computers will become reality.

We’re just going to be walking through this giant networked computer world. And if Nodle doesn’t succeed, we’re going to see the big tech companies of the world build this stuff. And that might not be a world you want to live in. So we’re very confident that if there’s going to be a trillion things that have to be decentralized, has to be secure. And we have to have these, these privacy protocols built-in natively to it.

If you look at the laws in California, there’s no right there’s zero regulation on what can be collected by an autonomous vehicle. So every time these things go by, they’re mapping license plates, they’re mapping faces. There’s basically no regulation because it’s a public space. And so imagine that times a trillion. What does that mean for the world? So we think that privacy and decentralization are, are going to be essential. Let’s take the next question if that’s okay, Micha. Why don’t we take some “Hands Up”, take some questions from the audience?

17:42 DM
Benny. I’m allowing you to speak Benny.

17:49 Benny (Community Member)
Oh, hi. Can you hear me?

17:50 DM
Yeah. Hi, Benny! How are you?

17:52 Benny
Oh, I’m good. I’m good. Thank you. I just have a generic question regarding the software app. I downloaded the app about two or three months ago on my iPhone and I’ve been trying to actively make sure that it’s always working and is up and running. I believe there’s some sort of issue with iOS. Could you just run down to us what is the difference between Android and iPhone? Thank you.

18:26 MB
I think I will take this question. So, iOS is a bit more difficult. They are much more aggressive than Android when it comes to killing a process that’s running in the background. We have overcome that a lot by actually activating location services, and maintaining them through different techniques because we have long expertise in that space for maintaining the process as long as possible. We still think we can make improvements. So I think the app is going to improve a lot in the coming six months when it comes to maintaining this process in the background. Also, because as the network grows and as the density of the network improves in certain locations, then this will also help maintain these processes in the background. So you don’t need to have always, your phone with the screen on.

So on iOS now, we recommend that you should go back to the app often and you should keep the screen on. That’s the best way for you to keep on generating rewards and connecting things. If you have a MacBook with the [Apple] M1 processor, you can also now run the app on your MacBook, which is pretty cool. It’s not optimized for the [Apple] M1 yet but it is working. And obviously, on the Mac, you can maintain the process more easily than on the smartphone. Android has always been easier to deal with the Bluetooth interface and to maintain processes in the background. The new updates on Android sometimes try to shut down this process, so we recommend users to actually go into the settings in the battery to go into the specific application, Nodle Cash. Ask for the removal of the optimization of the battery for the app. And that will improve basically the processes and have the app generate more rewards.

Garrett, do you want to add more?

20:46 GK
Yeah, and we’re also working with smartphone manufacturers as well to really optimize the process at the OS layer. They love the idea of providing value after they sell the phone, just because most Android phones, don’t, I think the profit margin is literally in the 10s of dollars if they’re lucky. So they’re also looking for ways to reward the users and increase their benefit after they’re sold.

Also, if people want to just chat questions, they can do that, as well. We had a few people have their hands up. I know, Rick, I saw you for a while. Do you want to ask your question? And then we can take Jay. Go ahead, Rick. Otherwise, we’ll take Jay.

21:36 DM
One second, Rick. I’m trying to…here we go. So you should be able to speak, Rick.

21:44 Rick (Community Member)
Can you hear me now?

21:45 DM
Yeah. Hey, Rick.

21:47 Rick
Thank you, guys. I heard you guys speak on the technology and I think it’s awesome! I want you to comment on the economics and tokenomics of the project. What are you guys doing in terms of like, what is your focus in terms of client base? And who are your target clients?

22:08 GK
Sure.

22:08 Rick
And are the potential customers, do they purchase Nodle Cash in order to use the service? Or maybe you can get into explaining how the tokenomics of it all works?

22:22 MB
There are many aspects to your question. So I want to take advantage of answering your question by answering also someone else’s question which was I think was how we intend to cover enough or have enough coverage to be able to provide a good service? So the network and the ecosystem are built like a multi-sided marketplace. On one side, you have the supply and these are people like you who are installing the Nodle Cash app and generating Nodle Cash by connecting to devices and creating coverage with their smartphone. There are people like app developers who embedding the networking library and basically build that coverage and presence on smartphones at another scale because they have access very often to millions of smartphones through their app. And so that’s basically the supply side. We think we can achieve reasonable coverage pretty quickly because we actually made tests in the past. And we were able to get fantastic results.

I mean, we made tests because we had potential customers, which are big names among the big five companies that you all know that were asking us to help them actually to do a better job to be able to locate their devices when it comes to services like Find My. So we were able to see that in some cities, we actually achieved a pretty good density already. We had this, for example, working in Japan, in Tokyo, where we were taking a specific area. And we were able to tell how many times per hour we were having someone with a node passing by to be able to collect data from that specific area. So I don’t think we will have issues reaching a reasonable coverage globally.

If we can keep on basically growing the community like we do and develop more partnerships with people like app developers, or manufacturers of smartphones, who are willing to embed our technology. Or even mobile operators who are going to use technology to provide basically some of the services that can be built on the network. So that’s the supply side. On the demand side, you have enterprises that want to use the services and access the network. The first services that we built, we built them ourselves. So the smart asset API to look at things or collect data from sensors — we built it ourselves.

We have a lot of companies that use it [our smart asset API] already that used it in the past and will use it in the future for locating items. And they are pretty big players. People who build shipping pallets and the number of units in the shipping parts industry is in billions of units a year. People like rapid couriers who ship every day, millions of packages of mail, who want to use the network. These are just using some of the applications we built ourselves. What we want is the community of app developers to develop applications directly on our network and our ecosystem and be the one being paid by the community, I mean by the people who purchase the service to build these services.

When it comes to that, there are different kinds of services we can add too. And we have defined in the white paper, just only 20, but we actually think it’s hundreds of applications that can be built on the network. And maybe I will let Garrett mentioned a few of them to provide more details on what we just said. But we think that actually, the app developers at some point, with the new applications that can run on their own will be the ones driving more and more demand for the network. And to come back to your point. Yes, for people to access these services they need to pay in Nodle Cash. They need to use Nodle Cash.

26:18 MB
So Garrett if you could, if you want to go into some examples of customers.

26:22 GK
Yeah.

And so we can dive into that I think people have a lot of other questions too. We have built essentially a platform with API’s

26:32 Listener (Community Member)
Good afternoon, can you hear me?

26:34 GK
One second, I just wanted to say one thing. Basically, we’ve built a platform with services and then we built managed service on top. So the asset tracking API. We did some things around COVID. We build these services and then demo them with customers to really show demand. Our long-term goal is to actually build out a platform where people can build new things because we keep finding really interesting things that people want to do with this network that we’ve never imagined. And that’s why we’re just focusing on how to scale this network, how to really build out the platform. So we had one more question. Rick, I’m just gonna mute you if that’s okay?

27:13 Rick
Can I interject one quick one before you do that?

27:16 GK
Sure. Go ahead.

27:17 Rick
Yeah, so my question, basically, in addition to like, when currently when all the phones are currently mining, is there a subsidy involved in the mining process right now? And how is the paid service kind of meld together?

27:41 GK
Sure. Micha, did you want to take that one?

27:45 MB
I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear it. Go ahead.

27:50 GK
Sure, I’ll take it.

And I’m just gonna mute you Rick. So right now it comes from essentially our mine pool. So in the beginning, Nodle was very easy to mine, so we mined a bunch of coins. And now there’s still a large pool of tokens, of coins that are unmined. And so the people that are mining coins are coming from this unmined pool. In terms of when people are building services on top of the network that will basically, you can think of like a revenue share, will go out to these users from actual services running on the network. But most of the network today is built just from this unmined pool. So hopefully that answers your question. And we’ll do our best to answer most of the tokenomics questions. I know, our legal team doesn’t want us to basically answer anything, but we’ll do our best to explain this. And we’re also working on some materials to go more in-depth to the theory behind what we’re doing. I’ll take one. Jay, I know you had some questions. I’m going to unmute you. And I also think I saw you on the Telegram group, sorry, the Discord as well. So I know you had some good questions. Go ahead, Jay.

29:15 Jay (Community Member)
Hey, guys. I’m sorry for pinging you guys so much. I’ve been diving into the project the last couple of days and I tend to get involved on the economic sides of crypto projects, but I can ping some of you guys after some of the more complex stuff here. The simple sort of tied-together question is when should we expect to see more transparency around the oracle calculations? Because that is largely going to drive how people optimize, you know, the network and right now. We all know that data isn’t handled the same. Like paid data is higher, unpaid data is lower. But just the dramatic sort of range that we’re seeing in the value of packets and things like that. There’s a lot of opaqueness there that I would love to sort of dig in as a community into what that calculation looks like and how to incentivize. You know, there’s like the paid data, which, you know, in my opinion, should sort of be one bucket that you get paid out for, then there’s sort of the data or the rewards to incentivize the growth of the network, which shouldn’t really tie to whether or not it’s paid.

30:35 MB
So, Jay, that’s a very good question. I mean, the goal is to basically let an oracle be fully transparent. So you can actually check the formula and verify all these things. I think we’re going by steps. Our goal is really to get to the point where basically, there’s full transparency on everything that’s happening. It’s going to take a bit of time, though, I mean, some of the issues that we had actually, last week, were coming from the fact that we had to write the way we calculate these rewards. And there’s a lot of complexity because it’s millions of elements and items that need to be considered at the same time.

So what you’re going to start seeing is, we’re going to announce a partnership with specific providers of appliances or sensors and we will notify the community that if they actually use these appliances or sensors, or they are in proximity of them, then basically the level of the reward will be higher than for other traditional sensors. So that’s going to be a way to be also more transparent, and also give the community ways to increase the reward by maybe buying an air quality sensor from a specific provider, or buying just a temperature sensor from a specific provider we are partnering with. And I think that’s going to be the best way for the community also to understand what’s happening better and to appreciate the rewards formula.

What is sure is it’s a very complex thing that we are building, and we will have over time to change the reward formula and update it very often. So yeah, it’s a process that’s going to take time, before it arrives to something that basically can be working fully autonomously with a toggle. We really want the system to become fully autonomous at some point and be fully decentralized. And basically, we want to let the network be run by the people who will be participating in building the infrastructures, the validator nodes, which is also a big part of the token economics.

32:45 Jay
Yeah. But like, do you expect them at some point in the near future to, get to that point where the oracle, like, the way it’s set up right now in a centralized manner, it’s, it’s sort of all on you guys, versus allowing the community sort of say, “Okay, this is where you guys are gonna run into gaming opportunities, arbitrages” is like, you know, in my opinion, having 10 or 15 people’s eyes, and that is a lot more helpful than having two is that or whatever the number five, is that? Or should we expect a fully transparent oracle sometime soon?

33:23 MB
I totally agree, Jay. We want to get there.

But before we want to get there, we want to start to accept validator nodes, basically to start really decentralizing the infrastructure to another level. And after that, yes, the next step will be to provide more transparency on the formula, and also to have the community participate, and have the community vote also sometimes on basically the directions we are taking in, in how the formula is going to evolve.

So 100% agree, I’m in agreement with you on this. We hope we can get there yesterday, I would say. But it takes time.

And to come back to your point. Today, it may be a handful of people who are basically deciding on these things. But it’s probably the right thing to do at this stage where we are. But where we want to get is to a point where not only just the community, but the people who are actually purchasing the services on the network will be participating on that. And so the same way you have on the app, I don’t know if you were already on the app, but we had at some point missions being introduced last year. We’re going to bring back these missions where basically, users can be rewarded more for taking certain actions or certain paths, and that’s going to influence also the reward.

34:45 Jay
So from a high level, I’m interested in hearing your opinion on, how much value do you guys put on call it proof-of-coverage, which is what some other networks call it, but providing and incentivizing non-paid rewards that are not connected to paid data, because they have two very different value ads. And it’s sort of a chicken and the egg where if you want, you know, massive data coverage that companies are going to get into, leaving a whole bunch of people that are earning nothing, while there are no paid nodes around them, you know, is gonna sort of limit your ability to build that network.

35:25 MB
So that’s exactly the point I was touching on when it comes to missions? Yes, and it’s already in the formula, like, when we implement all of the elements that are in the white paper, you will see that you have more value as a node if you are alone in a location than if you have 10 people around you, like if you take a bus and you have 15 users of Nodle Cash on the bus, then these 15 users have less value than if you’re just the only one on that bus to be able to collect the data. So yes, this is going to be taken into account, and with the missions, there are going to be rewards and payments that are not going to be related directly to the formula that will be related to achieving certain things. And among these things, it can be going to a specific location. And I think you’re going to start to see that and people will understand with the next update of the app where you’re going to see this kind of thing basically being introduced in the user experience.

36:21 GK
It’s gonna be very cool.

Jay, let’s continue…

36:25 Jay
Yeah, I don’t want to take up all the time here.

36:27 GK
Let’s continue in the Telegram. I’m going to mute you back. But I think anyone that can poke holes in our tokenomics, we encourage you guys to do these things. Because it’s just going to improve the community as a whole. Our main kind of theory behind this is that demand for wireless networks generally doubles every 12 to 20 months. I think it’s actually accelerating. But it’s based on something called Ed Homes’ Law, and something called Marty Cooper’s law, which generally is the idea that our ability to send data in a given wireless spectrum is increasing. When people take advantage of that, they want to fill it up by watching Netflix and sending data and machines talking to each other.

And we actually think that there’s some data to show that the demand for IoT is actually accelerating much more quickly than humans. And so by building a network that’s focused on IoT, we can actually capture that demand, and then use that demand to directly incentivize growth. And so we think that we can, we can have some really interesting growth potentials by directly incentivizing the supply. But we also think that also means that some of the traditional tokenomics theories that apply to other networks, might not apply to wireless networks.

Dominic, I know you’ve had your hand raised for a while. So I’m going to unmute you and let you ask your question. Go ahead. Are you able to speak Dominic? It looks like you have to unmute. I’ll give you five more seconds, and then we’ll… Hans, I know that you wanted to speak as well. So I’m just going to mute Dominic again. And, Hans, I’m going to unmute you. Go ahead, Hans. Hans, can you speak? Alright, well, I’m gonna go take some questions from the community. Daren or Micha, did you have any good ones that you wanted to mention? I know we have some pretty cool ones.

38:33 DM
Yeah! A lot of people have questions about Missions. I’m so excited to relaunch. But when? When Missions?

38:44 GK
Maybe we keep that one a little secret for now. I had some cool calls with some companies that actually want to use that to try to get people into remote areas. Let’s release the new app and then we can talk a bit more about that.

39:01 DM
Do we have any information on a new app?

39:09 MB
We can say that the UI is pretty advanced. And yes, we are getting close.

I think we will maybe share a few screens of the new app in the community before it gets released to tease everyone and to show that we are progressing. But the new app will be introducing Missions actually for the first new users who will come in. Basically, they will be asked to do something and be rewarded for it.

39:46 GK
Yeah. Another question was, “In the future, can we expect a Nodle-dedicated device like Helium or something like that?” The honest answer is I would love to build something like that. The also honest answer is that building hardware kills. We build our own custom hardware for contact tracing during COVID. And actually trying to build hardware in America is just a big ol’ mess. We’re actually probably 20 or 30 years behind Asia in that regard. So, yes, it’s something we’d love to do. It doesn’t make any economic sense right now. And we think that we want to get really good at supporting things like phones and Tesla’s and all kinds of other existing hardware because that’s really our way that we can scale before building a dedicated device.

40:38 MB
Yeah, we will actually on that topic announced a partnership with a manufacturer of similar base stations pretty soon. So yes, our strategy is to partner with manufacturers who build base stations and enable our app to run on their hardware. Actually, for even people who are already doing this with Helium, there will be also an app for Raspberry Pi so that will be able to run on these boxes, as well.

41:09 GK
Yeah, cell towers have a lot of computing power. And for most of the day, they’re not being used. So that there’s something cool there. Hans, I know you’ve raised your hand again. So I’ll give you a few seconds to speak. Hans, were able to ask your question?

41:27 Hans (Community Member)
Good evening, everybody. Can you hear me? Clearly?

41:30 GK
Yeah, we hear you. Great. Thanks for coming. What’s your question?

41:38 Hans
I hope you can hear me clearly. I’m gonna try to ask my question. First off, the founders of Nodle, thank you very much for this AMA. I’m delighted to be part of this. And at the same time, I’m very enthusiastic about the future that is upon us. Let’s get right down to my question. I’m a business developer by profession. So I work with technical companies and try to assist them in the roadmap development. One of the curious things about Nodle is that I haven’t seen a roadmap, which is really tailored to the marketing aspect over the coming few years. Maybe I’m a bit ahead of schedule, let’s say but I’m curious how do the Nodle team aims to increase the scalability of the company? And secondly, how the company will try to at least mitigate customer adoption, also in the near future? Thank you very much.

42:43 GK
Sure.

42:45 MB
So thank you. Yeah, these are very good questions. So I think we share the roadmap in the deck, which was showing the previous achievements of the company and the future achievements in a deck that we rolled out when we actually perform the first token sale. We have a roadmap that is up to date. What happened is that recently, we organized the way we are working with the company. We went from 12 people in the month of February/March to now more than 30 people in the company. We plan to be almost 45 in the coming two months. So that has been basically taking a lot of our time to be able to scale the team and reorganize the way we work.

It’s not the same when you have 10 people then you’re almost at 50 people to work together. So that created a bit of inertia. But I think once this is going to be flowing better and we’re going to become more and more efficient. And we also will be able to update more often. The goals. And the way it is organizing the company is we have different teams. You have different teams for different aspects of the technology. One is responsible for the services, and the network. You have a team responsible for the mobile application. And you have a team responsible for the blockchain architecture, and infrastructure. So each of these teams has specific goals for each quarter. They have intermediary goals each month for each month. And that’s basically how we are really reorganizing the whole company. So once this is going, [it will be] flowing a bit better now that we are really implementing all this. We started the first quarter working that way, actually, at the beginning of July. So it’s very recent.

I think you’re gonna see more updates on the roadmap and yes, we will also redo the website. We plan to have that happen in the coming weeks. You will see also more transparency on what is to come and be deployed on the network. So I hope that answers your question.

45:20 GK
We have another question from ManDood: “Would aggregators have access to purchase this data? For example, could Axiom buy this data to enhance their data insights?”

So one thing that we’re very clear about is we do not sell raw data. We’ve had lots of people offer. I’m sure you guys have heard of all the fun stories of shady data resellers? It’s really more crazy than the movies. And so no, we wouldn’t provide raw data access. We are looking at how can we provide insights? How can we actually provide a search query on top of our network?

Because a lot of Bluetooth devices, follow a Bluetooth language, which is called GATT. And so a lot of devices, actually billions of devices all broadcast, their temperature, their battery level. I can actually go into our network, we can search battery level, hit “Enter,” and the battery level of millions of devices is returned back to us. So this idea of what is a searchable wireless network? What does it mean? What is what can you do with that? I don’t know yet. So we’re looking right now really the privacy implications of this. Also, the infrastructural challenges that querying, you know, hundreds of gigabytes daily, can mean. And also, you know, what, what can we learn? And how can basically, the owners of these IoT devices actually get rewarded by offering up some of these things?

So as Micha mentioned, we’re going to start to explore some of these ideas by allowing people to buy devices, buy Bluetooth devices that actually collect data, and get rewarded more for that data. So you are an owner of an IoT device. It’s generating maybe temperature or humidity, and you get paid for that. So we’re starting to experiment with some of these things. Right now. And we’ll probably open that up once we’ve really solved some of those privacy challenges.

So, Daren, I don’t know if you have any other good ones. I’m also going through the document to see if we have any stuff that stands out. We have RS, that wants to speak. So I’m going to unmute RS. And Hans if you have more questions, feel free to type them in the chat. We can answer them there. So RS, you are on the air.

47:39 RS (Community Member)
Hi, guys. Can you hear me?

47:41 GK
Yes. Hello.

47:44 RS
Hi, thanks for having this AMA. It’s been great. I know that you will be joining the Parachain auctions on Polkadot Network in the coming months. And I saw, I’ve also been looking to other projects as well. And I know that there are some strong projects behind joining the Parachain auctions as well. How confident, is my question. How confident are you that you’ll be able to secure a Parachain slot? And what are the consequences if a Parachain slot cannot be secure? Thanks.

48:22 GK
Sure.

48:25 MB
Thank you, RS! I can take this one Garrett. And maybe you can add more. So thank you for this question. We, like I mentioned earlier, and at the very beginning, we believe a lot in the Polkadot ecosystem and the interoperability of these different blockchains and ecosystems to work with one another. So one reason why we want to have a Parachain is to be able to offer our IoT services or any services that app developers are developing in our ecosystem to actually other ecosystems running on other chains. So that’s the reason we want to have a Parachain. We’re not specifically looking at Parachain for securing the network because we believe we have enough traction with validator nodes that we can secure our own network and eventually we could be even completely independent. And so, but there is an advantage and we actually want to have a Parachain to be able to offer our services to other ecosystems.

We are confident we will get a slot because we have pretty strong partners who we are working with already like Republic for example, who now works also more closely with companies like Galaxy Digital, and they are working on projects that will help projects like us attract more people to be able to stake their $DOTS to help us have a Parachain slot. So we are building these partnerships. We also have [our own] $DOTS that we’re going to contribute for the securing of the Parachain slot.

What is important is we also don’t want to have this slot, basically reaching crazy, crazy amounts. I think it has to be reasonable. And to answer your question, yeah, if we don’t secure a Parachain, which I don’t think because we were one of the first two mainnets on Polkadot. So I think it would be logical that we become one of the top ecosystems built on Substrate Polkadot and that we have a Parachain. But in the event, it does not happen, then, I mean, the network can secure itself. We have enough traction, we have enough people who want to participate in building validator nodes for that. So there are also other ways that are outside of Parachain that are now starting to be provided like bridges to basically reach different ecosystems, whether it’s the Ethereum ecosystem, or the Polkadot system itself. So I think for marketing reasons for confirming our beliefs and or reinforcing our partnership with the whole Polkadot ecosystem, I think it’s important we get the Parachain, but we could very well be completely independent and run that project completely independent.

51:34 GK
Yeah, I’d say that’s a pretty good overview. I mean, you know, I’ve even told Polkadot. I said, “Guys, you know, we’re not going to spend $60 million on a slot it doesn’t… whatever the price is, these days.” I know some of the Kusama slots went for a lot of money. You know, it’s like the internet in the 90s. If creating a website, on the internet in the 90s, costs $60 million, you wouldn’t have the internet today. So I think it’s a balance. Obviously, Polkadot provides a different value proposition than the Internet does. But is it kinda worthless what some of these prices are going for on Kusama? Definitely debatable. But also, a lot of our early investors, equity investors are big $DOT holders as well. So we’re feeling very confident that we can get a slot. And I think that it’ll…Polkadot also, the company wants to make sure that it’s it makes sense for people and that it’s incentivized, so we’re very confident about that.

One question we got is, “Can the app get congested in really busy environments? So where there’s a lot of Bluetooth devices around?”

Yes, so a few things happen. The most common is that just the Bluetooth will crash.

So Bluetooth is actually a dark art. It’s nobody actually implements Bluetooth to the spec.

And so that means on Android, probably iOS, there are bugs, there are issues in there. And anywhere from the chip to the OS to the app. And that means that sometimes Bluetooth will just crash. On Android, you see this. You saw it a lot on older versions of Android, like the past two or three versions where you just have to restart the Bluetooth for it to work. The second thing that can happen is that you can actually saturate the wireless environment. You can just fill up the spectrum with noise so that some Bluetooth devices don’t start to show up. But you would then be you’d still be able to get some packets through. So what you’re seeing is one device basically just goes to zero, that’s actually probably the system just crashing like the modem is just failing. And then it has to reset itself. So Bluetooth is super buggy, even on production releases of the most modern operating systems. So once you start to dive into that, you realize that “Oh, LTE and 5G are also really buggy.” For implementations on Android and iOS. There’s a lot of things like CBRS that just don’t work on modern smartphones. So we had a few more questions. Daren?

54:13 DM
Yeah, before we get to a couple of the last questions, some important announcements.

We are hiring if you guys have followed us on Twitter. Especially for a Senior DevOps Backend Engineer. You can email your CV at people@nodle.co or apply to http://nodle.breezy.hr. And we’re offering referral rewards. So it’s 100 NODL per qualified candidate referral, and 10,000 NODL for a successful hire. Your name must be mentioned in the application process if referring somebody to receive credit.

And Garrett, something that you’ve been working on…Sounds like a commercial, right? Garrett, something that you’ve been working on a lot is app developer adoption. Using our SDK. Do you want to talk about how you’re onboarding? We just had a big announcement with ESTV, maybe you can touch on that before we take our last questions.

55:10 GK
Sure, yeah. So we had, we’re working really on just closing app developers because the bigger the network can be, the more devices we can connect, the more value we can create.

So we just partnered with ESTV for their own app, but also their ecosystem. So if you guys are or know any app developers, we’re also offering rewards for that. So one of the big ways that we grow our network is through SDK partnerships. So we have a Nodle cash app, we also have a Nodle SDK, which can basically be embedded into games and all kinds of things like that. So that’s how we actually plan on growing our network significantly. Today, we have a lot of nodes as an SDK, but actually, the best data, the best nodes that we get are actually you guys, these are Noble Cash app users.

So if you know anyone that has an app, let us know. We’ll give you Nodle Cash. So I know Micha’s gotta jump. We can probably take one or two more questions before we go. ManDood, you actually asked a really good question, I’m going to allow you to speak and you can ask your other question. Go ahead.

56:24 ManDood (Community Member)
I can hear me all right.

56:26 GK
Yeah, we can hear you.

56:29 ManDood
I’m going to dig a little deeper into your customers here just to understand the data privacy behind it. So, I know you said you’re not selling raw data. So you’re not gonna sell the phone number, the device ID, things like that. But…

56:42 MB
Just to be clear ManDood on this, so you’ve probably noticed that when you create an account on Nodle Cash, we don’t ask you for an email. We don’t ask for your phone number. Basically, we don’t ask for your name. We have no information about all these things. And we made it a point actually to be very minimal, just to be able to protect people’s privacy, the best. And that’s very, very important to us and core to what we are building.

57:17 GK
Yeah. And ManDood, did you catch our answer to your question earlier about selling data?

57:23 ManDood
Yeah, that’s kinda where my question’s headed. Are you guys looking at having subscribers and then they buy devices? Or are you looking at selling this like kind of bulk data maybe be identified or some kind of segmented measures that?

57:37 GK
Just IoT? We’re really looking at IoT data, I answered your question, maybe 10 or 15 minutes ago. Basically, we’re very privacy-conscious. So if the only data that we provide today is you have an IoT device, you can prove to us that that’s yours. And then that data goes to the cloud. Basically, any device, basically, data that that device is transmitting, can be routed up to the cloud. In terms of broad-level analytics, we will never sell raw data. We believe it’s just too dangerous. We’ve had lots of people try to buy it from us. Someday I’ll write a book about it all. But no, we will not provide raw data. In terms of insights, we’re starting to look at, yeah, how can we use our network as a search engine for the physical world? So we’re beginning with, okay, well, we have some partner devices. You can buy a temperature sensor or something like that. And then you get a bit of extra Nodle Cash by collecting that data. So that’s something that we are looking at, we hope to pilot in the next couple of months. So does that answer your question?

58:46 MB
And there is one interesting aspect actually, ManDood that we can highlight is. So we spend a lot of time on research and development, actually, Lucien, who is doing that and spending most of his time on this, came up with an architecture that we’re going to push at some point where actually the data never touches the cloud servers and gets routed automatically, to the smart contracts and applications that basically you that are providing a specific service, or get pushed to the basically the owner of the devices that push the data. And that will make it I mean, very, very, actually, even more private, and, then we’ll announce the overall system. And we, we think it’s something that’s going to be necessary as we grow and have the network basically grows. And that’s very important. Nodes have the capacity to be virtual machines and to host apps for app developers or businesses that want to connect or interact with their IoT devices. And that’s one aspect we haven’t added. I’ll talk a lot about it.

I’m very, very proud of this evolution and in the architecture of the network, because it will basically bring the decentralization of the network to another level and, and basically have all these apps that today work on servers in the cloud to be able to run directly at the edge of the network.

1:00:24 GK
Yep. So I guess the last question, before we wrap it up is, “Can you summarize the top five highlights of the last few months?” Micha, maybe you have some things that are on your mind?

1:00:45 MB
Well, a lot has happened for us in the last five months, we survived COVID. Last year, we went from a company of 12 people. Where when you are 12 people, it’s more run like a lab to a much bigger company. We’re now like I said, we passed seven people. And we are going to be over 40 in the coming year, in the coming two months. So I would say that has been occupying a lot of time to just be able to scale up the team.

We have, I think in terms of architecture, also, on the blockchain side, we have achieved, we have achieved a lot and we are really decentralized now that the network is accepting different nodes, it’s a big step that’s going to happen in the coming months. And we are super excited about that. Because it’s really the beginning of a fully decentralized IoT network where we are not the only ones who will be running these nodes, it will be people who have a stake in the network, who are partners in the network and people who want to generate revenues from participating in the validation of the data. So that’s all in the transaction. So that’s basically super important. And it’s a very important piece of work. So I would say it’s the second big thing.

The third element, I would mention, will be the number of partnerships that we have put in place and are going to be announced in the coming weeks.

I mean, you will see we really have built partnership is pretty robust and the companies in the past, many notice that we have a partnership with Cisco Meraki for some time, we have one of these HTC, we’re going to announce a big one with Ledger, the hardware wallet, basically provider. And on the IoT side.

So I mean, all these things, we’re gonna announce also a partnership that we mentioned before with manufacturers of base stations. So all these things have been taking time.

I think the mobile app also is going to evolve in a pretty good direction when you have the new user experience.

So we’ve been actually working on a lot of things in the last months and scaling the company.

And I think you’re going to see a lot of announcements and excitement actually on the network for the six months to come.

And yet the highlight also from the past five months, I would say it was the first sale of our token. That happened. We basically waited four years, before almost four years before to start to sell tokens. So that was a big, big step.

All right. Well, I think with that, we can wrap up our little AMA. Feel free to ask questions in the community on Telegram. We’re most active there. I’m also trying to be active on our Discord. If you happen to like really deep technical stuff, that’s kind of what we like to keep the Discord for. So we’ll be around the whole day. And I’ll do my best to check in on the chats whenever I can.

So thank you, everybody, for being part of the Nodle community. We just want to say that this network is built by you guys. So we really thank you for being part of it.

1:03:57 GK
Thank you so much.

1:04:00 MB
Thank you, everyone, for joining, and I hope we can have an AMA more often with everyone. Yep.

1:04:09 GK
All right. Bye. Bye, everybody.

1:04:10 DM
Bye-bye. Thank you, everyone.

Nodle Official Community AMA / Q&A w/ Co-Founders Micha Benoliel & Garrett Kinsman

TL;DR Highlights:

Nodle AMA Transcription

Written by Nodle