Improve Internet Quality and Earn Passive Income with These DePIN Nodes

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the live today. I excited to talk about this with me and Keith have been, uh, talking here for a few months now, actually. Um, and I really like what they're doing again. I've been on the lookout for crypto projects that are actually solving real world problems. So I'm done with meme coins. I'm done with Ponzi's. I'm done with, Hey, what is, what is the blockchain accomplishing in your project? Oh, well, it's just cool. I'm done with that. Okay. I'm looking for real world problems. And blockchain solutions to solve them. And so Kualu is right down my path. So excited to hear about this talk with Keith through this. Um, before we get started, so we're going to talk a little bit about improving internet quality and using the blockchain to make that happen. Um, this might be something that, you know, I'm in the U S we take this for granted. We just have internet everywhere that we go. Uh, there you really, you know, if you don't have wifi, you have your phone with 5g and there's no problem anywhere. But that's, it's not like that in the rest of the world, in many places in the world. So first comment, question of the day, I want you to comment down below. How much, uh, what percentage of your day are you doing things that require the internet? So you have to think about, you know, when you're driving and you're listening to Spotify, that's internet. Um, actually I drive a Tesla. So even my driving is internet. Um, but what percentage of your day do you think is internet focused? Let me know in the comments. Um, and if you have questions as we're going, please let us know Keith's the man in the know. Over to Keith. Now, Keith, let's start with introductions. Tell us a little bit about how did you get to where you're at? How'd you find blockchain? How'd you get to this company? And then, uh, we'll jump into Kualu from there. Yeah. So I'm Keith Dawson. I'm the CEO and founder at Kualu. I've been working in telecoms my entire career, which is kind of coming up 25 years now. Pretty much focused on engineering, helping, um, make sure people get good access to internet, you know, uh, started in the early days on the old fashioned cable, jointing, copper cables, network planning. Went into telecom consultancy after that. And, um, you know, landed on this problem where, you know, the internet isn't good for everybody, you know, and, um, you know, I mean, you guys have a pretty good in the cities, but in the rural areas, the pretty terrible, even in the U S and even worse around, around the world. And yeah, so I, um, as I was working on these problems, you know, there was a huge headache we had is like, when people say the internet's not working, when it's slow browsing, when your game's lagging, what the hell's going on? You know, and that's the problem that we try to chat, uh, try to tackle. I kind of had this interest in crypto being in since 2017, back in the ICOs or back in the day, and it was around that time where I came up with the initial concept of what quality was doing is like, how can we use blockchain? And now deep in, as we know, it wasn't called deep in back then, but we had little boxes we put in people's homes that measured internet quality. Now everybody knows them as, as deep in devices and how can we create these incentivized models to help get the public, um, involved in tackling a huge problem, such as internet quality. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Um, so can you kind of explain, uh, I always like to start too. So that tells us a little bit about you. Um, what exactly, what's the elevator pitch for what quality is looking to do? So you're in an elevator floors, one to six, somebody says, Hey, what do you do? Uh, what, what do you answer that? Yes. So quality is, uh, a decentralized physical infrastructure network. Deep in, we, we combine elements of web three blockchain and AI to help people get better connected to the internet. And we do this with two kinds of nodes in our network. We have a mobile node, a physical node, which is essentially a little computer you plug into your home internet. And this maps the entire internet in real time, not just local in your house, you know, how you communicate with the rest of the world. So we're really looking at the, the micro and the macro performance level of the home internet. We're identifying any reasons why your internet slow, why it's lagging. And then we have this kind of knowledge across the network. And, um, in return for that, we're running a node, helping to build this internet map. We reward the users in our QXT token. What's, uh, while also helping them to optimize their own internet connections and contributing to this map that helps everybody else get better. Okay. I, and I love that mission. Now that's a really, a really good mission. Um, do you want to talk a little bit about how big of a problem that this is? Because again, in the U S it's, it's very foreign to us. Like we're just take it for granted. Um, but the rest of the world, um, and most us people don't get outside of the U S either. So we just don't know what it's like out there. Do you want to talk about how big of a problem this is and, um, how this, yeah, I mean, it's, uh, I mean, the big thing for us was during COVID, you know, people were locked down working from home and that really exposed the quality of the internet for all the people, you know, so this, this term we now know as the digital divide, where people either don't have access to internet or they don't have sufficient quality to be able to work from home or jump on a call and watch YouTube that was, that, that really kind of kicked it off for us because there's, there wasn't a clear plan for how governments, telecom providers, and even end users approach this problem. You know, so I come from a background of telecom consultancy where I specifically go in and work with countries, with regulators, with telecoms providers to fix these problems that cost them millions of dollars, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. A big part of that process was we need to put devices out. We need to map the current state. This gives us the visibility of all of the problems, and then we can pick them off bit by bit. You need to invest in the network here. You need to optimize the network there. Um, even for small businesses and home users, you know, right down to you haven't set your wifi problem up, uh, uh, properly. And I mean, that comes, it brings us to like the state of the internet today, where everything we do is online, you know, and everything's going cashless. If you don't have internet, you can't pay for your coffee. You can't, you can't order that, you know, that Amazon delivery you want. I think so. We've come to a time where we just cannot survive without internet. And for many people in developing areas of the world, that means they're not able to participate in this digital economy. So that's a huge, um, challenge that governments, multinational organizations are trying to focus on. There's, there's billions of dollars being spent. There's lots of think tanks and, um, papers, digital initiative, uh, initiative papers, but out there, but quality really brings the blueprint of how you bring all this together and help the whole planet get better access to. Absolutely. So, uh, I love that. What do, uh, how does this fit in with like, I know Elon Musk, for example, is looking to get Starlink and get, you know, worldwide internet through that. Um, I don't know. How does that fit in with what you guys are doing? And I just want to see if you have any thoughts on, um, I know that Google's tried the balloons for, you know, wifi all over the planet, things like that. Um, how does that fit in? Yeah. So there's, if you look at the internet as we use it, you know, we kind of just see it as a layer we can all talk to each other, you know, wherever we are, whatever, at any time, but when you look under the surface, there's lots of different parts of the internet. There's lots of different stakeholders. You know, there's the kind of the access networks, which is how we get to your homes. And this is the kind of the challenge that Elon Musk is trying to address with Starlink and things like that. There's, there's not sufficient cable across the rural areas. What's the cheapest way it's very expensive to put new cables across, but you can put satellites, you can get big coverage and then, but on the other side of that, your data that goes via the satellites or via your mobile or by the regular kind of fiber internet, it's still got to go back to a landing point on the, on the terrestrial ground. And that's still got to be shared with all the other internet providers around the world. So we really kind of look at the big picture. One of the things we do is, is benchmark and analyze these different types of services. So is satellite really good enough? Is it really the answer or is it just a stop gap? You know, so it's better than nothing, but a lot of the, the, the, the kind of the standard and specifications that the government's then wants in is like, it doesn't matter where you are, any place, anytime you can use the internet, you know, so that if you have issues with weather, that's already breaking the specification and things like that. So we're really looking at the, the big picture and the important thing that's often missed is how the traffic is shared between these different providers. How our traffic is rooted from me over in Asia and you over in America. And that is where a lot of the problems exist. Okay. Yeah. Good, good answer. And then, um, so something I talked about on the channel yesterday actually, and I think it applies here too, is there's a lot of companies who are using blockchain. And then when I ask, okay, why are you using blockchain to do that? They just, it's well, that's cool. That's the hotness right now. Um, why is Kualu using blockchain technology? How does blockchain technology help your guys's mission and you do what you wanted, uh, what you're doing? Yeah, there's two big sides of that. So one is the deep inside, which is obviously a hot narrative in crypto, which is, has blockchain on the line. But for us, what we felt when we were working on consultancy projects, you would go in and work with one provider and the data's hidden, you're not allowed to share it and all things like that. Um, the other side of that is your internet provider only controls such a tiny part of the network. You can't influence, you know, the global scale from, from move on. So we really needed to build a global network that was across all service providers and who are you going to get to pay for this, right? Who are you going to get to fund it? You know, who are you going to get to coordinate that all of those things are impossible in traditional means because you know, what does your provider care about a provider on the other side of the world? So by using things like deep in and, uh, and blockchain, we can engage a community to get in, to get involved in the mission, everybody wants better access to the internet themselves and for everybody else, um, everybody wants to get a piece of the rewards, you know, and we want to incentivize that with payments, what's our tokenized model was a perfect fit for that. It helps us to factor in who's contributing what to the network, who's getting it out of the network and we can pay them across international bound borders and things like that. And the type of data that we're collecting is sensitive data. It's evidence-based. We need to document when there's a problem where it's coming from. So what better way than put it onto something like an immutable blockchain that can handle high, high, um, transactions and things like that. And for us, like the, when we had this idea back in 2017, you didn't have this web three, you didn't have this community, you didn't have these layer twos that offer all this scalability. So it was kind of the perfect time for us between, um, between the web three community tokenized models, um, and it was this blended of all these technologies that made it a perfect time, as well as we have this perfect, uh, narrative now where everybody on the planet is talking about everybody needs access to internet. So it was a, it was a perfect time for us. And blockchain was the, uh, the perfect technology to, to, uh, to do that. And there's one more thing around that is the, the kind of the censorship permissionless side of the network. We really want users to run nodes. They don't need any permission from service providers. And that ensures that the data is transparent. We can create accountability and it can't be censored as well. So those were the main things while, while we chose the blockchain route. Okay. Love that. Uh, no, that's, that's amazing. It's a very cool mission. And, um, I really liked this and again, really excited about just, you know, I've always been a crypto guy, but I've seen so much crypto used for just worthless things like meme coins. And I'm just tired of it. And so it's like, okay, here's blockchain doing something, accomplishing something. So I'm, I'm excited about it. Um, so my audience, they mainly want to know how they can make more money. Okay. That's why, that's why people watch me is they want to know, Hey, how can I make some money? So do you want to talk a little bit about, um, the nodes and just how my audience can potentially profit off of your mission and what you guys are doing? Yeah. So we have two nodes, you know, the mobile node helps us to map wifi networks, um, mobile networks. And the fixed nodes are more for traditional networks. You know, it might be your copper, your fiber, your enterprise networks. So both of them together helps us to map the entire digital kind of landscape, right? And it doesn't matter to us whether you're on Starlink, whether you're on 5g, whether you want any other exotic technology to get connected, all we care is it's internet connection connectivity and what the nodes do. They essentially map the entire internet. We're looking for any kind of weak links, but the most important thing, and that's the most valuable, especially for end users or internet providers is whenever that network is delivering a below par service, we can see what the problem is, where it's coming from. They don't need to send technicians. They don't need to, um, you know, uh, even for the end users, they don't need to report faults anymore. So that removes a huge operational expenditure layer from the telecoms industry, which is worth millions of dollars, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on the size of it. And that's where we really, um, make the money, you know, so, so for, for regular internet users, they will run a node, they'll help map the network. They will check into the hotels, coffee shops, and things like that. We do the rest on the, on the data insides, B2B, um, sides. That revenue is redistributed back to the people that run nodes. So there'll be earning points, rewards, uh, and the QST token. And that's how everybody can, you know, earn that passive income while contributing to get a better internet connection themselves and, you know, for everybody else as we, as we actively working on improving the internet everywhere. Okay. Awesome. I'd love to talk about the, uh, the token here in just a minute, but, um, on the nodes, do you know, are those are not available yet? Correct. Um, do you know, yeah. Yeah. So the, we're just, we've coming into a pretty intensive three month period where we're doing, you know, all the team have come together, we're all staying in one house and, you know, in, in Asia, we're working on release of mobile apps and, and fix nodes and, and going through a accelerator program with, with IoTeX as well. So the, the, the best way for people to get, uh, in touch is to sign up for the early access. There'll be the first ones to get the beater access to the mobile app and the fixed nodes. But it's, it's all going to be coming out over the next couple of months. So, um, stay tuned for that and sign up and you'll be the first one to download the app, start earning points and, uh, getting on your way. Okay. Awesome. So yeah, if you're interested in one of those nodes, they're not available quite yet, but it will be soon. So you definitely want to follow them on Twitter. Um, hop into the discord, hop into the telegram, got all these nice links here and then fill out this early access, uh, form. You're not committing to anything when you do that, but they'll just let you know, Hey, these nodes are available. They're ready to run. Um, and then do you, I don't know, do you have any info on like how much that will cost, um, what the potential rewards will be, um, any info on that? Yeah. I mean, the, the, we're looking for kind of return on investment in pretty short term, you know, definitely less than six months, but the, the cost, I mean, for us, the value comes from our network coverage and we're actually going to be subsidizing some of the nodes, especially in some of the rural developing areas. And there'll also be ways for the communities to pay, to sponsor nodes in some of these areas, but it's going to be less than a hundred dollars. You know, that's, that's the kind of price point we want to try to get as close to, to $50 as possible. And we're also looking at ways where the node can actually be downloaded. So if you have a Raspberry Pi at home, you can download and spin up a node because, uh, you know, software is, is easily portable now, and especially with, um, the deep in networks, there's a, we're working on a number of other deep in and web three projects where there'll be kind of an opportunity to do dual mining through some of these partnerships, you could enable the quality nodes, you, you know, you can be besides your weather station or your decentralized wifi project, and you can earn quality points and tokens as well. So that we really want to get the network out there and we want as much global coverage as possible because, um, you know, every node that is activated, it expands our coverage, it helps us improve the internet in that country, in that region, and really get better value for, you know, billions of users, basically who are going to benefit from this network. Okay. Awesome. Um, and then let's talk about the token. So, uh, what is the token out now and what's the token going to be used for? And I know people get concerned too, if the tokens being what's paid out as rewards, what's to stop it from the chart, just kind of going like this as people get paid out, um, talk a little bit about the token and the plan there. Yeah. So the QXT token, the quality experience token is pretty central to our ecosystem, right? Your people are going to be contributing the hardware, the bandwidth, the time, you know, and they're going to get rewarded in a token now on the, um, on the demand side for that as ISPs, telcos, businesses, or even end users want to pay for premium features, they'll be able to purchase that in the token as well as whether or the rewards and benefits as well. So we really want to, um, keep the token in the ecosystem. There'll be ways to get additional rewards, multipliers, staking lockups, um, other incentives around that, and also swap for premium features. Uh, eventually there'll be some kind of hardware, smart router, wifi platforms that, that we're releasing to really help you optimize your home networks, which you'll be able to subscribe and buy with a token as well. So there's, there's quite a lot planned for, for the token. Okay. Very good. Um, then I had a question too. Um, oh yes. I want to just kind of hear about your long-term goals. So if let's say everything goes according to plan, you raise enough money, everything, the nodes sell the way that they should and everything's going great. Where does this, what does this look like? And we'll say three years of everything kind of goes according to plan. What's the vision? Yeah. So, I mean, once the network is built, you'll see quality was the, the, the basic, the governance layer for the entire incident, you know, so a lot of the diagnostic tools, uh, coverage maps that's used by governments, telcos, even end users, um, so we would act a bit like the trust pilot as well for the entire incident. So that would see quality acting in that kind of layer. But the other side of that is we're going to have this global physical infrastructure network that's each node is tied to your service provider, your location, and that can be also used for data mining, um, data scraping, other AI models, and we also want to make the data, the data models we have open to third parties, maybe third parties want to run specific tasks and jobs on our network where they need to run it in a particular location or particular provider. Um, and then linking to other enterprise data models. So that's the, um, that's the kind of long-term vision. So the first mission is let's, let's stabilize the internet. Let's make sure everybody's got that level, but then let's utilize our asset, which is going to be this global network of physical, physical devices that are capable of so much more. And that's going to be other ways for node operators to run more money. If you run computation or jobs or custom tests from your node, you will earn the extra rewards for performing those tasks. Okay. Awesome. Love that. Um, and then, uh, what's kind of the next thing on the roadmap? What's the next big thing that you and your team is kind of, Hey, we're looking forward to this, uh, what's next on the list? Yes. I mean, the big, big thing now is we just got the partnership with IoTeX. We're launching on IoTeX blockchain. We've got their new IoTeX 2.0 functionality that enables us to bring a lot of new security data features to our network, a lot of computation side. And around that, the, on the release schedule is the next thing on the horizon is the mobile app. You know, you'll be able to check into those public wifi's, refer your friends, start mapping the network, which is coming next, and then after that, it's our fixed nodes. Um, we're all, like I said earlier, we're also going to be subsidizing that as well. So if you use our app and you're in an area where we want to have coverage, you could get a free node. So make sure you sign up for that. And the next thing after that is our, our TGE, you know, which is QXT is going to be coming out on IoTeX. It's in the roadmap for Q4 this year. And then around that, there'll be a couple of, uh, you know, exchanges, centralized exchanges and things like that. So there's a, it's a pretty action packed second half of the year for us. Okay. Yeah. And stay tuned because, um, I am kind of partnering up with, with Qualoo. I really like what they're doing. Again, I'm looking for these, these projects that are using blockchain to solve real world problems. Um, so stay tuned and we'll have announcements as these kind of milestones come up as the nodes are available, um, you will hear about it. So stay tuned for some of that. Um, I did want to ask what kind of partnerships, what would be some partnerships, um, for what you're doing? You know, things can spread a lot faster if you're able to team up with different people. So what partnerships are kind of in the works? Who are some ideal partnerships? Um, tell us about that a little bit. Yeah. So I mean, I'm the, I mean, for us, it's, you know, on this mission to make sure everyone gets better internet everywhere. And there's a lot of other projects that are trying to do similar things, tackling a different part of the problem. You know, you have the likes of world mobile who have expanded networks to really rural areas and things like that. So we really like what they're doing. We're also looking to partner with other deep in projects. So anyone who's got a ready deployed network that, um, that we can partner on and expand our network quickly. That's also, we're speaking to a few big ones. Um, same on the mobile phone side as well, where that would essentially see the Koala pre-installed on mobiles and web three platform across, across the world, but we're also looking at partnerships on the more typical government telco side as well. You know, so there's a few digital charities we're speaking with, um, who are trying to fund projects to get, um, higher access to internet and rural areas, uh, governments, telcos, as well as, um, some of the more like multinational organizations like ASEAN, EU, African union, we really see as, as being able to support those different regions and help them funnel the investment in a much more. Um, effective way and make sure that, um, everything's, you know, everyone, everywhere has got that same level of, of, uh, internet access. Okay. Very cool. Um, all right. So again, we talked about this. I'm a marketing guy, so I'm obsessed with calls to action. Um, that's what, what is it that you would like the people watching? What would you like them to know exactly? What would you like them to do right now? Is it stay tuned? Is it follow on Twitter? What, what would you like from my community? Yeah. So we've kind of been working a lot behind the scenes. We're starting to come out into more public building mode. Definitely follow our socials. We're very active on Twitter. We just started, um, multiple Twitter campaigns this month. Different giveaways sign up on our website for the early access to the node. You'll be the first ones to, to get a node. There's a space in there for you to put in how your internet quality is where you are on, on the planet, because we're going to be dropping them in, uh, in strategic locations as well. Let us know how your internet is in your areas as well, because we're actively looking to help those out who have the worst internet, you know, so, uh, that's part of the, uh, as you, we released the app, we're going to be mapping this in real time. We're actively reaching out with governments, service providers, businesses. So like, this is really going to give you a voice, you know, if you don't have good internet, um, you know, contribute and, uh, you know, we're going to be working behind the scenes to do that. So definitely stay tuned, keep an eye out next month for early version of the app coming out. And, uh, as we say, like this, this, um, model is let's make the internet better together because it's going to take all of us to make it better and not just end users. It's going to need service providers can be governments. And quality is really going to be that platform that brings everybody together and creates that accountability and transparency where there is non currently. And what better time than a time where we've never been more needed to be connected for everything we do so we can all prosper together. Yep. And the internet's only going to take over more and more of, of what we do and how we function. Um, so let's make the internet better together. And it's not just a charity. You're not doing it for free, but you get paid to help make the internet better. And again, that's the beauty of what cryptocurrency blockchain and these deep in projects, um, you're helping and getting paid for it. Uh, you know, can't, can't be that that's a pretty good deal. So I'm getting paid for it. Yeah. Yep. What more could you ask for? Awesome. Love it. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap up there again. This is kind of just an introduction, a little tease into Kualu. Um, I will have them back many more times as we get closer to launch and we'll do updates and things like that. Um, so audience appreciate you guys. I hope you'll leave a like, if you like these deep in projects. Um, I've been on the lookout forum. And so when this one came across my lap, actually, someone brought it to me and I was like, oh, thank goodness. Thank you. So if you guys have great projects like this, that are actually solving a problem, please bring them to me and I'll bring them on the channel. And I would love to do that. Um, and thank you, Keith. Thank you for working so hard. I know you guys have been burning both sides of the, uh, the midnight oil and the morning oil. So appreciate, uh, appreciate you doing that. Working on us, our American time schedules. Um, whenever we have meetings, you, uh, you're in Asia, so the timing's always interesting, but appreciate that. And thanks for coming on and talking to my audience about it. Thanks James. And yep. Keep in touch. Awesome. Sounds great. Thank you everyone. Have a great day. If you're in Asia, have a great night's sleep. Keith, uh, tell the rest of the team hello for me as well. And we'll talk to you. Bye. All right. Thanks.