NATIX brings thousands of AI-powered sensors to Economy of Things on peaq

peaq, the Web3 network powering the Economy of Things, announces the expansion of its ecosystem, as NATIX, a privacy-first company focused on AI and IoT real-world use cases, joins the peaq ecosystem. As part of the integration, it brings Drive&, its leading drive-to-earn app and AI-powered decentralized sensor network, on peaq. NATIX will leverage peaq’s suite of tools for decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) such as assigning a self-sovereign peaq ID for every sensor in its DePIN.

Would you carry around a true sensor constellation beaming your location and troves of other sensitive data to dozens of shadowy brokers and marketplaces? Those of us who own a smartphone are already doing so, and the glaring privacy risks posed by the ever-growing number of sensors installed in connected devices are obvious. From surveillance cameras to health trackers, there are more and more sensors around us, and for all the usefulness of the insights they provide, their prevalence leaves little hope for privacy.

NATIX enables businesses and individuals to make the most of this abundance of data without infringing on your privacy. With the help of AI, edge devices like phones and cameras can  convert raw data, such as video feeds, into useful information which users can trade in for rewards. Such information could range from counting cars on the road to estimate traffic congestion, to counting people to measure how crowded a location is. By sharing these insights, anonymized on the edge device, device owners can earn rewards in the NATIX ecosystem.

As the first stage of the integration, NATIX will build a proof-of-concept (PoC) project on peaq, testing the use of self-sovereign peaq IDs as part of its recently-launched Drive& app, already installed by more than 6600 users since its release in early April 2023, mapping more than 470,000 km worth of roads and detecting more than 7.2M million events. The PoC will also leverage peaq access, peaq’s role-based access management function. 

The second stage will take the integration live, connecting the Drive& DePIN with peaq and enabling Drive& users to earn extra rewards through the peaq network’s machine rewards mechanism which distributes a part of network revenues to connected devices. It may first be tested on krest, peaq’s sister network which is going live on Kusama this quarter, before it goes live on the peaq mainnet.

“The Web3 tech stack plus AI turn the non-stop proliferation of sensors into a blessing in disguise,” says Alireza Ghods, co-founder and CEO of NATIX. “They enable both private and business users to do more with the infrastructure that’s already there while ensuring everyone’s privacy through edge computing. The DePIN model is perfect for scaling such networks, and peaq’s set of tools and machine rewards work as a power multiplier for it by boosting functionality and rewards — and the incentive for users to join.”

“DePINs can scale faster than traditional infrastructure providers, and using this model for consumer devices like smartphones amplifies this scalability even more,” says Leonard Dorlöchter, co-founder of peaq. “We’re excited to see NATIX spearhead this model for the first sensor DePIN on peaq, and its masterful use of AI for ensuring user privacy is a great example of putting this amazing technology to work for a good cause.”