Inside Token2049: Game-Changing Web3 Trends You Need to Know

The episode dives deep into cutting-edge themes—from the evolving "chain wars" and tokenized equity with Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, to Hedera’s enterprise-driven growth with Kamal Youssefi, and GeodNet’s real-world GPS breakthrough via blockchain with David Chen. Whether you're a developer, investor, or crypto-native builder, this episode delivers rare and specific insights about the future of decentralized infrastructure, token economics, and AI-driven analytics. Don’t miss this data-rich, prediction-packed conversation direct from the frontlines of blockchain innovation.

Key Topics Covered

• The Chain Wars and Ethereum’s Waning Dominance
  Alex Svanevik breaks down how Ethereum is being outpaced by chains like Solana, Tron, and BNB in on-chain activity and gas fee revenue, a shift that signals growing competitiveness across L1 ecosystems.
  
  
• Tokenized Equity: The Future of Ownership
  Svanevik predicts a boom in tokenized equity—offering real business ownership on-chain—as a regulatory shift unlocks opportunities that appeal to both institutions and retail investors.
  
  
• Hedera’s Hybrid Governance Model
  Kamal Youssefi reveals the unique structure of Hedera’s Governing Council and how it has enabled secure, public, and enterprise-ready DLT solutions across multiple industries and geographies.
  
  
• GeodNet’s Disruption of GPS Accuracy
  David Chen unveils how GeodNet’s decentralized RTK network increases GPS precision by 100x, transforming applications from autonomous agriculture to Web3-based proof of location.
  
  
• AI-Enhanced On-Chain Analytics with Nansen
  Svanevik introduces agent-first UX and smart alerts that will revolutionize how users interact with data and gain portfolio insights, all powered by AI and Nansen’s massive data engine.
  
  

Episode Highlights

"ETH is actually losing its lead. Chains like Solana have overtaken it on lots of different metrics."
—Alex Svanevik

"Tokenized equity is what excites me most. It’s what investors actually want—real ownership."
—Alex Svanevik

"With 16,000 RTK base stations, GeodNet achieves GPS accuracy down to the centimeter level."
—David Chen

"The most important use case across industries? Self-sovereign digital identity."
—Kamal Youssefi

"We're launching agent-first user experiences. Nansen will know your portfolio and history before you ask."
—Alex Svanevik

People and Resources Mentioned

• Alex Svanevik – CEO, Nansen
  
  
• Kamal Youssefi – Executive Chairman, Hashgraph Group
  
  
• David Chen – Co-Founder, GeodNet
  
  
• Josh Kriger – Co-Host, Edge of Show
  
  
• Richard Carthon – Co-Host, Edge of Show
  
  
• Nansen
  
  
• Hedera
  
  
• GeodNet
  
  
• Hyperliquid
  
  
• Proof of Talk – Token 2049

Transcript:

Josh Kriger: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Edge of Show live at Token 2049 Dubai. I'm here with a very special guest, Alex Spanovic, the CEO and co-founder of Nansen. It's great to have you on the show. Good to be here, man. So I understand, you know, we've been talking about how it's a little bit hot. You just have to do a keynote outside.
Alex Svanevik : I did.
Josh Kriger: So that was a little bit of an endurance test for you.
Alex Svanevik : Yes, it was actually. I started my talk saying that if I pass out, please call an ambulance. And I will do the same with the audience. But yeah, it was actually a very cool venue. Could have been like five, 10 Celsius degrees colder, but it's good to be here.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, maybe I'll dial back the weeks for next year. But great to have you. I want to talk to you about your keynote and sort of your thoughts in the industry. But just a little background, folks, if you don't know, Nansen is one of the leading industry platforms for on-chain analytics. And they've sort of combined together both artificial intelligence and data science. Alex has built one of the most powerful tools in Web 3, so thank you for that.
Alex Svanevik : My pleasure. It's been a fun journey so far.
Josh Kriger: So tell us a little bit about your keynote and sort of what's kind of the tea leaves telling us at this point in terms of the data on the industry?
Alex Svanevik : Yeah. I mean, I try to use these as almost like a bit of a weather report. We just talked about that earlier. But there were a couple of themes I talked about. One big one is what I refer to as the chain wars. bit like the console wars or the browser wars, where the chains are basically all competing to win. If we went back four years ago, I was kind of an ETH maximalist. I was like, ETH is going to take it all. I don't know what's the point of creating other chains. But the data is very clearly telling us that ETH is actually losing its lead. And chains like Solana have overtaken it on lots of different on-chain metrics. So to me, that's kind of, that's actually a meaningful development. And even on metrics like revenues or gas fees, like total gas fees, it's fallen behind in the last like three, four months. So chains like Tron, Solana, and even on some days BNB chain generate more revenues from gas than Ethereum L1, even if you add in the L2s.
Josh Kriger: Wow.
Alex Svanevik : So to me, that's like a very fascinating development. And in a way, it's kind of, I think it's obviously good for the competing chains. And I think ultimately it's good for consumers because it means it's an open free market where they have to compete to create the best platform. Right. Yeah.
Josh Kriger: So with that said, one burning question that comes up a lot in the show and I'm sure you think about is like, does on-chain activity correlate to, you know, token value and token value acceleration? Or, you know, is there a situation now where some layer ones, layer twos are really viscous. They're like great for on-chain activity, but it's hard to retain that value.
Alex Svanevik : Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I've looked at a couple of different metrics along these lines and I think what I would say is You know, there is definitely some degree of kind of like, I don't know if you'd call it wash trading or like inorganic activity. But this but this is kind of this is crypto. And we do we give incentives to people to do stuff all the time. So it's like very hard to tease out what is like genuine activity. Right. But I think, you know, one metric that Ethereum still leads on is TVL. And so I think that is an important metric of just capital, like real capital. You can't fake capital. Yeah. Right. So like if you put billions of 20 billion dollars in Aave, right, that's like more than whatever you find on pretty much any other chain. Yeah. So but yeah. So if you if you look at tokens themselves, I mean, I think you probably have to have some like minimal amount of activity. to have liquidity and to have good distribution of holders and that kind of stuff. We're actually adding some new features to that soon. Cool.
Josh Kriger: We'll have to get into that. So another burning question I have is with all, you know, it seems like it's been a rough year for launches. You know, in terms of I haven't seen too many projects take off and be able to retain um, you know the value and and it doesn't seem to necessarily tolerate to The vc vesting terms like if they're on a long vest and everything. Yeah, it seems like um, you know where where There's a lot of people pulling from the same audiences And they come they come to dinner and then they go to the next center in the next center. So, um, is that what the data shows too and in in you know Like, are we at an unprecedented time where, you know, what it takes to successfully launch is just changing and the nature of our industry is changing? Or is this a temporary glitch?
Alex Svanevik : Well, maybe we should focus more on building great products instead of just launching a bunch of tokens. And why not? To me, that's like part of the story, actually. Yeah.
Josh Kriger: Because I think we're launching unprecedented numbers of tokens.
Alex Svanevik : Right. Exactly. So there's like you kind of saturating the market. Yeah. But also there's like too little emphasis on building great products and To be honest, I think a lot of products don't even need a token in the first place.
Josh Kriger: What's an example of a great product that launched this last year?
Alex Svanevik : Well, you know, to be honest, I think some of the chains are actually quite good examples. Like we just spoke to BitLayer, guys, like Bitcoin L2. Yeah. Yeah. Arguably like Abstract. I think a lot of the chains actually. But I guess your question is more like maybe at the AppLayer. That's where you have, I think, absence. You don't really have that many great apps. I would say Hyperliquid maybe is the best example, actually, if I would pick one, because it is genuinely a great product. If you've ever used it, it's a great trading experience. They have 10% of Binance's purse volume. 10%. Then how do you explain... And they have 60% market share of DEX perks. And they are 10 times bigger than number two. So it's like, no, that's it. That's an example of it's a great product and it has a token that makes sense. Right. And then what's the logic behind Fartcoin? Yeah, I just don't know enough about Far Cry. It's one of those coins that I should look at it, but I just never do. It's just, it comes up all the time and I'm just trying to understand the data. I think if you had to pick one, I think Hyper Liquid is the clear answer.
Josh Kriger: Yeah. I have a lot of folks excited about that one. Not financial advice, of course. Yeah. So talk to us about how Nansen's evolved in terms of your mission and the mechanics you use to sort of analyze the market. Certainly, AI and other types of analytical technology has evolved a lot since you started. Yeah.
Alex Svanevik : Yeah. I mean, I think we're actually in a new paradigm now. We're just building software in general because of AI. And I think very soon you're not going to be using Nansen in the way you used Nansen before. You're going to use an agent and the agent uses Nansen.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
Alex Svanevik : Right? That's not like sci-fi. That's going to literally start happening in the next two to three months. That's going to become the norm. Okay. And so I think that's one of the things I'm very excited about. My background is in AI, so I've always been
Josh Kriger: I mean, it's a lot easier, because I think for some people, your platform was probably intimidating. It's too clunky.
Alex Svanevik : It's like, where do I go? What do I click? Like, where do I find this thing? If you could just ask an agent, like, here's what I want to do. Like, help me do it. And then it goes out, does the work, comes back, and here's the answer. Like, the other day, I saw a bit of a back and forth on Twitter between Framework, Vance from Framework, and Michael from Curve. I think they've had some, like, lawsuit, whatever. And so I was like, I wonder what Framework's on-chain history on Curve is. And so I asked this, like, agent prototype we have in-house, like, literally that question. It goes out, does the work, comes back, and it writes a one-pager of the full history on-chain of Framework trading Curve. It was like receiving from this governance contract and it looks like they stopped trading the token in 2023, whatever. And it was like, that's unbelievable.
Josh Kriger: So is this sort of agent technology you're implementing going to have common prompts and is also going to customize those prompts based on what it learns about what you care about?
Alex Svanevik : So, okay, there's a couple of things, right? The first thing that's coming is an MCP. And if you're not that technical, a Model Context Protocol, it just means that you can pull Nelson into your agent product or AI product, ChatchDBT Cloud Cursor, and you have Nelson access from there. So your agent can work with Nelson. That's the first thing that's happening. Then I'm not going to reel too much on the next thing, but the next thing is going to be like an agent first user experience that's coming to Nansen in one way or another. And that experience is going to be personalized. It's going to know your trading history. It's going to know your portfolio. and have all that context so that when you ask it stuff, it like knows what it should talk about.
Josh Kriger: And can it solve the number one problem in my life, which is like with all the software out there, I don't have a good, consistent way of alerting myself when there's significant shifts in a token that I have. Oh, we have that now. Yeah.
Alex Svanevik : Yeah. Smart alerts. All right. And now that you have an account. Thank you, by the way. You're welcome. You can set it up and you should give me feedback on it because we've made it a lot better. It used to be a little bit slow because for Solana and so on, there's a lot of infrastructure you have to do, but we've radically improved the latency on these smart alerts. So if you set up alerts for like, I have one on like Pengoo, like any transaction over a hundred thousand dollars, I get an immediate alert on my Telegram just for fun. Yeah. And you can see who is trading it, too, because it's nonsense. Right. We have like four hundred million hours.
Josh Kriger: I can't wait. This is going to be fun. We should talk about NFTs a little bit. What's your thoughts on where it's going at this point? And sort of the hybrid NFT took sort of fungible, non fungible economies and the potential there. I think we're clearly at a different point. We're seeing low lows. There's you know, like everyone said, there's some blue chips that are out there doing their thing. People are asking, will NFTs come back? I don't know the answer. Right. Yeah.
Alex Svanevik : What's your thoughts? I mean, I think there's a few things. Maybe you can like talk about two separate things that are often like sort of merged. Right. There's like NFTs in general, which, of course, are a useful concept and structure that will exist if you have a real estate, like a property. on a blockchain, that's an NFT because it's a unique object. I mean, it's essentially it's like a piece of paper. You can literally do anything with it. It's a unique object. Right. So so like that's not going anywhere. Like that's going to stay. And for real world assets and all that, NFTs are going to be very important. The other thing is like PFPs specifically, which I think was maybe what you were thinking of. And for PFPs, my view has has been that it's largely similar to the ICO boom in 2017, which is there was so much garbage. But you had some iconic, in that case, companies that came out of that, like Binance did an ICO in 2017, for example, right? And now it's like one of the most valuable crypto projects ever, maybe the most valuable actually, right? Besides Bitcoin. I didn't know Binance did an ICO. They didn't? Yeah. I sadly missed on it, but I bought some BNB pretty early on. I got in on Filecoin. That was a good one. Yeah, but but then but then so my point is that there was a lot of like garbage and then there was some that really stood the test of time. And I think that's happening with PFPs, too. And you like, I still want I don't have a CryptoPunk, but I still keep like going back and like, is this the right time to buy Punk? And I was looking at like 27 ETH or something and I was like, I'll buy it. And I didn't. And I was like 40 something. So I think there's enough people in the world. that want to buy a collection of 8,888 or 10,000 items. For the good ones. For the good ones.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
Alex Svanevik : Because that's not for all of them. It's like the Gucci or Bottega Veneta or, you know, all these other luxury brands. It's the same thing. It has it has like a very strong brand value. And I don't think that goes away.
Josh Kriger: Yeah. And I guess the other part is like, are you seeing with the sort of regulatory shift and everything and we now know NFTs are not securities, is there going to be more creative uses of NFTs coming forward in terms of the non-digital art side, the membership utility?
Alex Svanevik : So the thing I'm most excited about for crypto which I think will be ushered forward because of regulatory changes in the US, is tokenized equity. So that's not really NFTs. But that's the thing. Is that like real world assets in your mind or something else? I think it's OK. Let's look at it from like a barbell approach of meme coins are over here. Very appealing to retail institutions don't want to deal with them. Then you have like tokenized treasuries over here like institutions want it. Retail couldn't care less. There's literally like six billion dollars worth of tokenized treasuries on chain. 1200 addresses that own them. So like, no, no retail cares about this. Tokenized equity is the thing in the middle that appeals to both. I mean, like, I want to own a piece of winter mute, or I want to own a piece of some great crypto company. But I don't want like a bullshit token. I want like, ownership in the business.
Josh Kriger: Yeah. I mean, look out NASDAQ. Right. I mean, that's that that's an exciting proposition.
Alex Svanevik : I think chains like Solana are very well positioned to have tokenized equity, be traded on them very, very soon.
Josh Kriger: Yeah. And I mean, while you're at it, why not have some of the tokenized equity in Solana? I think that we've learned that token economies do not always correlate to the actual inherent value of the business.
Alex Svanevik : But if you can diversify and have both, then it creates... I feel like it's kind of reinventing the wheel and like dancing around securities laws because like we've created these governance tokens and kind of come up with you know, bullshit tokenomics, when in reality, what you want as an investor is to own a piece of the business.
Josh Kriger: Yeah. But you want it with some liquidity that you're used to. Of course.
Alex Svanevik : That's the issue. That's the issue. But that's the thing I think is going to change.
Josh Kriger: I think we're going to get that. That's exciting. I hope you're right there and your prophecy comes through. One more thing I just want to hit on and I think we can chat for hours. I'm so fascinated by your perspective on the industry is you've launched Nansen Staking. So 123,000 plus walls already. Congrats. That's right. What's the vision here?
Alex Svanevik : Yeah. So many people are kind of puzzled. Like when we did this, we acquired stake with us, a Singaporean company. They had 60 million dollars worth of staked assets in September when we acquired them. And now we've grown that 20X to 1.2 billion in seven months. Wow. So the thinking here is that, you know, The people who use Nansen are on-chain investors. They all have tokens, okay? So that means they probably also have a lot of L1 tokens. And many of them are gonna want to stake them. So if they're already using our product, they trust our brand, why not stake with us as well and get certain benefits? And we're gonna launch Nansen Points very soon, which we should probably talk about in some other occasion because it's a very exciting project we're doing. But then the other thing we do is we also work very closely with the chains. Right? And we feel that the best way to align incentives with chains and to work with them is to run validators for their networks. And so when we integrate the chains we really believe in into an answer for analytics, portfolio tracking, on-chain alerts, why not also validate for their network? So we run Sol Validator, Sui, Tron, Hyperliquid, Ronin, like 30 plus different chains. You're already having to integrate to do the data. That's right. So basically it sort of makes a lot of sense from like a strategic partnership perspective. And also from the fact that right now, I assume you take some kind of fee on. It's a commission on the yields. That's like the standard.
Josh Kriger: So it's a it's sort of a new revenue line, which is always great. Everyone's got to be thinking about how to generate new revenue lines. But it's also a lot of value for your for your consumers.
Alex Svanevik : It feels like a triple win among like for us, for the chains and for the end users. And yeah, it's something I'm actually super excited about. And and we're now one of the top staking providers globally. in a very short amount of time. And I think we're going to keep going. Yeah, thanks.
Josh Kriger: Well, this is fun. I know you have a lot going on and you have to recover from your keynote still. If people want to learn more about Nansen and follow you on X, where should they go? Yeah, they should go to nansen.ai.
Alex Svanevik : They probably won't be able to spell my name for me on X, but they can look for a pudgy penguin with a viking helmet and a blue kimono. A. Svanavik is my handle. Just look for someone shitposting about some random topic.
Josh Kriger: and look for a penguin. It's fun that you're sort of making the industry more sophisticated, but you're not losing your sense of levity about the randomness of the industry that we all love. Yeah, that's what makes it so fun. I think so. I wouldn't want to do anything else.
SPEAKER_00: Alex, such a pleasure. Hello, everyone.
Josh Kriger: Josh Krueger here, co-host of The Edge of Show, live at Token 2049 in Dubai, here with a longtime partner, friend Kamal Youssefie, who's a pioneer, leader, and global blockchain advocate. He's executive chairman of the Hashgraph Group and president of the Hashgraph Association. It's great to finally have you on The Edge of Show.
Kamal Youssefi: Thank you. The pleasure is all mine.
Josh Kriger: Kamal, for those that don't know, he's played a really pivotal role in scaling the Hedera ecosystem into one of the world's most trusted distributed ledger networks. He's got a background that spans Ernst & Young, Swisscoin, SAP, founded the Hedera Governing Council. The list goes on and on. It's great to have you here and I think it's an exciting time in the region and globally. What's sort of on your mind entering this token 2049?
Kamal Youssefi: Yeah, it's my very first time here to be at Token 2049 here in Dubai. And it's a great pleasure to see the amount of development happening here in the Middle East, especially here out of Emirates, where you see a lot of pioneers, innovators, startups, enterprises gathering together, working on industry, real life use cases. building decentralized solutions, engaging with regulators, with government entities, to drive the broad adoption of Web3 solutions.
Josh Kriger: There's been a tremendous amount of growth in Hedera from the original idea, you know, 39 different governing council members, What was your original motivation for Hashgraph and how is that a vision evolved?
Kamal Youssefi: Indeed. Back in 2017 and in 2018, we had a lot of discussions and conversations, especially with the inventor of or the inventors of the Hashgraph consensus algorithm, Dr. Lehman Bird and Mance Harmon. and one of the discussions we had is how can we drive the broad adoption and how can we make it easier for highly regulated institutions to build their solutions on blockchain or DLT solutions and technologies and one of the components back at the time we had two options we had the public ledgers and then we have private ledgers back at the time the most prominent ones were like for the private version was Corda and Hyperledger and versus public ones which is Bitcoin and Ethereum and we were kind of discussing how can we make it easier for organizations because an organization or a highly regulated organization like a bank or an insurance it's not easy for them to build distributions on Bitcoin or Ethereum at the same time if they build on Corda or Hyperledger they kind of they are compromising on the decentralization and transparency in terms of opening or providing a public and an open ledger so the idea was like how can we be public and accessible to the public but at the same time governed and managed by a bunch of highly trusted and recognized organizations and that's where we started with the vision okay let's build a public ledger that is governed by Organizations representing up to 11 different industries, coming from different geographies, bringing different views on how to structure and how to govern the network. And that's how we ended up with a governing council consisting of up to 39 governing council organizations, basically big and 14 organizations that are bringing trust, bringing credibility, and also committing to manage and maintain the Hedera network.
Josh Kriger: That's great. So fast forward today, has it played out the way you expected?
Kamal Youssefi: Yes, it was not that easy at the beginning, especially with the initial five council members. So it took us about one year to establish that vision, agree on the mission. And now I think we started effectively in August 2018. And as we speak today, we have over 30 governing council members that are actively engaged in terms of bringing industry use cases, deploying the solutions in their own businesses, and also bringing industry insights on how to shape up the technology and how to shape up the platform so that we can serve the needs of these enterprise-grade organizations.
Josh Kriger: It sort of reminds me of some of the open government stuff I did back in the day, government consulting, you know, where you don't, when you have that ongoing consistent dialogue, it creates so many new ideas and possibilities. You cover some of the higher level sort of results. Any specific on the ground, you know, impact that you complain to, like a particular use case that's happened that you're excited about?
Kamal Youssefi: Yes, it's a very, very, very important question. So, I mean, we have been exploring and working on different projects and use cases ranging from DeFi solutions, on-chain finance solutions, real-world asset tokenization, consumer engagement, loyalty program. all the way up to sustainability. But one key use case that I all the time find again, it doesn't matter in which industry you are active at, it doesn't matter in which use case you are deploying, is the digital identity or the self-sovereign identity. This is one of the key use cases and the one that is enabling new solutions, re-decentralized solutions and really paving the path to establish The model of WIP3 solutions basically when you talk about WIP1, WIP2, WIP1 was like basically read, WIP2 was read and write and WIP3 was like read, write and own And to enable the concept of owning and interacting in a WIP3 world you all the time need a digital identity and a digital identity that you control and you manage
Josh Kriger: So that's been a popular topic on the show today and recently we got options, right? You can get your eyeball, your irises scanned, you can get your palm scanned, you can sort of have your identity through your passport. All of these solutions are sort of focused on, you know, encryption, eliminating the core data, just, you know, creating sort of this like marker. Is it to you, is it all, it's all good where you're comfortable with all these different mediums and forms of, or do you think one will ultimately become the primary providence or are we going to live in a distributed world of different identification protocols?
Kamal Youssefi: I think we'll see different solutions coming from different angles. I think we're still far away from having one master solution that handles all the different kind of... And you're comfortable with all those different ID methods personally? To be honest... I think it's needed as we speak today because it's very hard to standardize everything and it's very hard to bring all the key players to the same table. It's going to take some time but it's important to start somewhere and then the standards and unification of all these solutions is going to happen. It's just a question of time.
Josh Kriger: Makes sense. So my team researched a little bit of your background. I didn't know you were actually a lecturer at the University of Zurich. Zurich is beautiful. Indeed. Not a bad place to have to go to do some lectures. You're always welcome. You know, I'm curious about sort of what the students are sort of giving you inspiration in regard to and what they're thinking about and how that shapes your perspective on where the overall blockchain crypto industry is going.
Kamal Youssefi: Yes, as a lecturer at University of Zurich, I do contribute to different courses. One of them is the CAS, which is the Certified Advanced Studies. Basically, it's a course designed, let's say custom-made or tailor-made for professionals, basically executives that would like to have a deep dive and a clear understanding of digital assets and blockchain technologies. From this type of students, so let's say participants in this type of courses, They are all the time interested in understanding the real-life use cases. Basically not the theory, but show me successful use cases that have been implemented and adopted by enterprises. And one of these for example is the digital identity and they would like all the time to understand what are the new business models that the digital identity is opening up for them. for example stable coins, what type of payment solutions that they are enabling and what is it in it for them as a business, real world asset tokenization, how can real world asset tokenization revolutionize their businesses. Then you have the second category which are like students, regular students, that they decide to subscribe or attend, we call them elective modules, basically dedicated modules around blockchain and distributed ledgers. For them is more, give us a roadmap, how can I develop myself to be a pioneer in crypto? How can I be a successful entrepreneur or a successful engineer in the digital asset space? And for them, if you look at it from a holistic point of view, they are all interested in real life use cases that have been implemented, developed and live deployed in businesses.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, I think that's where things have to go. I think that there's good reasons for enterprises to be watching on the sidelines. And I think there's much more of a business case now, because inherent technology is never the issue. It was what baggage comes with using blockchain, where my general counsel, I'm going to pay them overtime for the next five years. So if it can become a little bit more standard operating procedure, I think the enterprises are going to bring a lot of volume, a lot of liquidity. Actually, I'm curious what predictions are on enterprise liquidity versus institutional liquidity. I think they're both really important. Indeed, I hear you.
Kamal Youssefi: Maybe just to comment and add to what you have said. Looking back, I mean 2017 and 18, people were quite curious to learn about the technologies, like what is the consensus algorithm, what is the protocol itself, like how the technology works. Now we are already in an era where individuals as well as institutions are more interested in the use cases, how can I create value out of that technology. And now it's getting to another level, which is how can I create synergies between blockchain, AI, IoT, robotics, and realize the concept of a web3 world. But yeah, in general, that's kind of the trends and that's kind of the evolution that we see now in the market. And it's just exciting times.
Josh Kriger: So there's a lot of interesting projects that have launched on Hedera. We had TuneFM on the show. We have several folks that we're working with that are going to do some things with Hedera. What's a recent launch that you just thought was really cool?
Kamal Youssefi: We have different engagements. One of them, for example, is the Deep Tech Venture Studio that we have launched in Saudi Arabia, basically a venture building program that is bringing engineering expertise with business acumen and project funding for local entrepreneurs to build solutions that are leveraging emerging technologies. So that's one of the key initiatives that we have recently launched and we are actively working on. There is another project that we have launched out of Morocco, basically deploying the digital identity for students. So it's a solution that's going to be adopted by roughly 9 million students across the kingdom. That's great. And basically provide them trainings, provide them access to WIP3 use cases in their curriculum, be it in the school or be it in the university. One other project that it's not public yet but that's something that we aim to announce in the upcoming weeks. It is related to fan ID and ticketing which is more or less related to the football clubs. That's something that we'll be announcing out of Morocco. And we plan to roll that out in other jurisdictions across all.
Josh Kriger: I
Kamal Youssefi: Hedera has been making very, I mean, as a protocol and as a platform, has proven its enterprise grade level. And when I mention enterprise grade, it does exclude startups. So when we say enterprise grade, basically we are satisfying the expectations and it's fulfilling and exceeding the expectations of enterprises. But at the same time, we are accessible for startups to build the solutions on Hedera. My prediction for Hedera, I mean we made massive progress over the last few months and I do see Hedera to be part of the top 10 protocols over the next two to three years.
Josh Kriger: All right, well I like that prediction and you know I think you guys have a bold vision and excited to keep the conversation rolling. We're doing a lot together in Riyadh, of course, and we'd love to have you guys involved in some other upcoming endeavors we'll announce soon. Thanks for being here. If folks want to learn more about Hedera, maybe follow you on X, where should they go?
Kamal Youssefi: So follow us on X, LinkedIn, and we have also now different social media channels, but the key ones I would say Xcent. Cool. And are you on X as well? Yes, I am on X. All right. So just Kamal Yousefi? Yes, that's Yousefi Kamal, but the new friend finally.
Josh Kriger: All right. Well, that wraps it up with Kamal live from Token 2049. This is the Edge of Show where builders and big ideas meet.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us. Thank you.
Richard Carthon: What's up everybody, Richard from the Edge of Show here. We are live at Token 2049 and we have an amazing guest here with us. We have David Chin who is with GeodNet. Pleasure to have you here today.
David Chen: Great, nice to meet you.
Richard Carthon: Hey, great to have you as well. So, you know, I'm really excited and one of the reasons that we wanted to bring you on the show was to just learn more about all the things that you've been working on. I mean, you're an OG in this space. We got to talk about this for a while. You've been in here since 2013. You started coding around 2015. So you have years of experience in this. So taking all that experience, what made you want to develop this particular company?
David Chen: Yeah, so I'm one of the three founders in GeodNet. So as three founders, two other founders, Mike and Yudan. So we met before 2021. And at that time, Mike and Yudan, we tried to solve this problem in Web2 way. It seems like they got some problem, so I get in to know them, because I know Yudan a little bit earlier. So we try getting to this use case and I think, you know, why do we do it in the blockchain way? So that's when we come up with the idea of Jonet, and we started to launch since September 2031. And actually, we tried to participate in the ION conference, which is one of the most important ones in geospace. And we published our white paper at that time, September 2021. And we received the best paper award in that conference. Wow. Yeah, so that's the start of our project and I think this is something new to the traditional space and also that's a good marriage between the latest technology and also blockchain.
Richard Carthon: Absolutely, and you know, one of the things I think is really cool that the three of you are able to come together and build is the concept around satellites and being able to bring, you know, using that technology with blockchain technology. So when you break that down into what is GeodNet, kind of tell us a little bit more about that concept.
David Chen: Yeah, so like GeodNet is a project that will provide largest RTK network, which will increase the GPS accuracy by 100 times. So if we talk about GPS, the typical accuracy is about one meter to five meter. I think a big city with a high building around it, the accuracy will be even worse. So that's good enough for, you know, it may not be good enough. It's okay to end-to-end car navigation. But for a lot of modern applications, it's not enough. Like when we're talking about autonomous driving, robots, drones, that's not enough. So for GeodNet, what we do is we utilize the technology called RTK. which is, you know, the device will receive a direct satellite signal from satellites and also from a nearby base station as a reference. And they run the algorithm so that can achieve the accuracy down to centimeter level. So basically increase the accuracy of traditional GPS by 100 times.
Richard Carthon: That's amazing. So being able to get that precise with your GPS location for, and obviously this sounds like a kind of a base layer application where the other things can be kind of built on top to utilize this service. What are some of the use cases that have arisen through what you've been able to create?
David Chen: Yeah, there are a lot of actually use cases. And we're actually getting about 20 paid business partners. Wow. They're already paying us. So our current revenue from those data services is about $3.5 million ARR. That's amazing. And we expect to grow very quickly. So one very good use case is agriculture. So, you know, I think you're from Texas, you know, a lot of the farmers in the Central Valley or Midwest East, so a lot of them are running autonomous tractors. So basically you'll have how many tractor running on the inside of in the field and, you know, moving back and forth. they typically require accuracy less than 10 centimeters. So obviously GPS doesn't work, right? So with RTK, they can do precise movement of the vehicles. You can, you know, spread a seed, you know, harvest and spread pesticide. So make it precise. you will reduce the waste, you know, you accidentally cut some of the, you know, crops, you will produce some waste. So with pre-size you can reduce, and also you can run 24 hours.
Richard Carthon: You can run 24 hours.
David Chen: So, you know, this technology been there for last 20 years, so it's 10 years, but the problem is there was no available base station coverage. We have web 2.0 providers already doing that, like the biggest one is Trimble in the United States, and the biggest one in Europe is Hexagon, but they cover a small area of the places. And up to date, they have about 5,000 base stations. And we have 16,000 base stations up to date. You know, three times more than they have. And also they've been building this base station for last like 10 to 20 years. And, you know, since the launch of the GeodNet, we only work on this about a little more than three years. So we spent three years and reached three times bigger than traditional Web2 companies. Wow.
Richard Carthon: That's a lot of growth. And the precision, like you said, is fast. I mean, just thinking about what you're doing with agriculture, I can immediately think of like several of the use cases that come about. But, you know, one of the things with this is just making sure that you can prove that this model works and then kind of go from there. So as you kind of look out, like at the time of this, you know, it's 2025. I'm sure there's several other things in areas that you're looking at. You know, what is kind of the roadmap look for the rest of this year on into the future?
David Chen: Yeah, so we will continue to explore the Web2 business because it's a proven business model. We got paid customers and it continues growing at a very fast speed, 400% a year. So we continue to explore this part. And also, we are looking to a broader view of our project. So we, as a crypto project, we are also looking to Web3 side. So that's, you know, we, our data is also be very useful for Web3 applications. So if you look at the GPS, so the accuracy is one thing. The other part is you can, it can be easily faked. You can fake your device, you can fake your GPS position to be somewhere in the desert or even on the top of the mountain Everest. So, If you want to build any location-aware application, either Web2, Web3, or gaming, without a provable location, your tokenomics build on top of WordCloud someday, right? So for us, because we have 16,000 base stations all around the world, they provide continuous real-time data reference to you, so we can actually provide proof of location. which is very critical to Web3 applications, gaming, and a lot of other things. So we will leverage that capability to increase our coverage in Web3 space.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome. Proof of location. That's the first I've heard of that. And I know that's going to seem to build out and expand, but the use case makes a lot of sense. And I know that a lot of people are going to grapple to this. So for someone who's listening to this and they're like, that all sounds awesome. I actually have some ideas of things I could potentially use to build out other use cases, et cetera. What are some of the ways that they can tap in and utilize what GeodNet is doing?
David Chen: Yes, so we have an API and our data is widely available. Anyone can get a free 14-day free trial. And if you're a developer, so you don't need to be in crypto space. So you can, you know, if you know GNSS, you have a cool ideas, want to utilize precise location, you can, you know, just go to geodnet.com to sign up our free trials. And also we released a new device called JuPause. It's been up there for a couple of months. So with that device, it's very cheap, $150, you can get a device. It's not like just a Web3 device. It's actually you can use for real businesses. So we have application. They are very interesting Geopods because it could be used for fleet management. So imagine you have a company managing 10,000 or 20,000 vehicles, and with traditional GPS, the error is pretty big, right? You could run the run into problem that you cannot properly identify the location of your vehicles. But with Geopulse, you can really pinpoint the exact location of that vehicle. So anyone, you know, Web 2, Web 3 developers, you know, if you want to get into the space, you can easily look into our website and check our API and explore, you know, what can precise location can do for you.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, we really appreciate that. So again, that's geodnet.com. Are there other places that people would be able to connect?
David Chen: Yeah, just follow us on Twitter and also Discord channel. We have a good YouTube channel as well. So feel free to follow and check our latest. Awesome. Well, David, thank you so much and appreciate you joining us today. Thank you very much, Richard. All right.

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