Leonard Dorlochter is the co-founder of peaq, the Web3 network powering the Economy of Things

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started in the blockchain industry?

I first delved into the blockchain space around the year of 2016. It was then when one of my co-founders told me about Ethereum, and I was really impressed by the idea of smart contracts. Just imagine: Instead of having to use a centralized application backend, you can leverage a decentralized network for that, removing the intermediary and bringing users more ownership, privacy, and security. The more I learned about it, the more excited I got, and that’s pretty much where I fell down the rabbit hole, as we say in the Web3 space.

Can you talk to us about peaq? What pushed you to create peaq? What was your vision?

Fundamentally, peaq comes from our vision of how automation is playing out. Machines are growing smarter by the day, and they’re also accounting for more and more value generation. But as robots replace humans, the profits more often than not go to the very select few. We wanted to turn this trend around and build the foundation for a more sustainable future – a future where communities own the machines that service them through Web3 means, without Big Tech intermediaries taking a cut.

Besides that, from the onset, blockchain seemed like the perfect solution to many of the woes that the Internet of Things industry is grappling with. This market is very siloed, fragmented between different ecosystems, suppliers, and standards. Blockchain is the perfect vendor-neutral digital infrastructure to bring all the players in this industry together. We saw this opportunity, and early on, we worked with leading companies, such as Audi, to help them build private, permissioned blockchains. However, this proved to be the wrong way, as a private blockchain is essentially almost as centralized as your regular backend, it doesn’t offer you the same scalability or security as a public one. That’s how we ended up in the proper, permissionless Web3 space.

What are a few things that most concern you about the automotive industry as it stands today? How do you think a transition to the Economy of Things (EoT) will help address these challenges?

Today’s automotive industry, especially its electrical vehicle (EV) sector, suffers from the same fragmentation problem as the rest of the IoT space. With an EV, you need to make sure the charging station at your destination is compatible with your car, and even if it is, you will likely have to create a new account with the specific service provider operating it. It’s a headache, one that hinders the larger EV adoption in Europe and beyond.

Furthermore, as vehicles get smarter, they begin to collect more and more data on their drivers. This is the bad old consumer surveillance we’ve come to expect from everything Web2, and its pervasiveness is very concerning.

A Web3 Economy of Things, where humans and machines get to enact their economic agency through a shared decentralized digital infrastructure, turns these things around. It offers the EV industry a neutral platform to foster interoperability and collaboration. It also grants drivers and vehicles more privacy by handing them ownership over their data through Self-Sovereign Machine Identities, decentralized identifiers that enable machines to ID one another on a peer-to-peer basis. This is a healthier business paradigm for the industry, and we see a lot of potential in it.

Can you tell our readers more about the strategic partnership between peaq and Ocean Protocol?

Ocean Protocol is a leading Web3 data platform connecting data vendors and consumers on a decentralized marketplace. Their technological stack perfectly compliments ours, enabling the data component of the Economy of Things. In more specific terms, it enables owners of machines running on peaq to sell the data these machines generate on Ocean’s decentralized marketplace. For example, an EV charging station owner would be able to put the charging session data up for sale to generate extra income.

Can you talk a bit about how peaq and Ocean Protocol are working together to create the future of mobility?

Mobility is at the heart of our collaboration within the Gaia-X 4FM moveID project, which also includes other leading Web3 organizations as well as top industry names such as Bosch, Airbus, and Continental. Ocean’s technological stack powers the Gaia-X data marketplace, where users and businesses can upload data and algorithms for sale. We are contributing our layer-1 blockchain to the project as the infrastructure for collaborators to build their decentralized applications on. We are also tailoring some of its functionality, such as Self-Sovereign Machine Identities and Role-Based Access Control, to real-world business needs of project participants and the standards of the larger Gaia-X consortium group.

Can you share with our readers a few of the exciting future applications that your partnership is working towards?

In short, it’s all about the data. Think of things such as a vehicle collecting and selling the data on the road conditions during its everyday operations – that is the kind of use cases that we are working toward.

Can you help articulate to our readers a few of the ways that the future of mobility you envision will help improve lives?

A Web3-based mobility industry will offer users a vast array of benefits. First of all, a less siloed EV market will make using electric vehicles more comfortable and effective. This will amp up their adoption, which in turn promises a greener future for the industry, solving such issues as range anxiety, the fear that there won’t be a compatible charging station along the way to the destination, for good.

Furthermore, with sovereign identities and data, a smarter mobility industry will no longer mean a more invasive mobility industry. Drivers will be free to choose who they sell their data to, and “nobody” will be a legitimate option to pick, if they want. Alternatively, they can choose to monetize their data and make extra money on that. This will put the digitization of mobility on a more sustainable basis and make it more compatible with the European compliance requirements – and, more importantly, its unwritten, but fundamental values.