Ambient Network: Decentralized Environmental Sensors on Solana

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every Friday from the Developer DAO, allowing founders, weekend hackers, and anyone in between to come on and showcase their product. And today I'm ecstatic to welcome Gilad and Luca, respectively CTO and CEO of Ambient Network. Ambient Network is the only environmental DePIN on Solana, backed by Solana, building the world's largest decentralized network of environmental sensors and ambient data. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Gilad and Luca give us an overview of Ambient Network, why they built it, and how you can get started with it today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Gilad and Luca. Pleasure to have both of you on. I know you both have some great stuff planned for us today, but before we get into that, perhaps you would like to give a brief introduction about yourselves.

Yeah, my name's Gilad. Been a developer in the Web3 space for a while. Started writing Solidity code back in 2017, 2018. I've worked on mostly Web3 infra stuff in the space and I joined Ambient Network about three or four months ago as CTO. And so, really excited to be back on DevNTell. So thanks for having us.

Nice. And I'm Luca Franchi, co-founder and CEO at Ambient. You know, I've had a mixed experience of 10 years of startups across media and telco and then another 10-plus years helping large corporates launch new business verticals or actually more recently invest out of San Francisco as a corporate VC across a number of different consumer and enterprise businesses. And that's where I got the blockchain bug back in 2016 and at the same time was also doing climate tech investments from a corporate responsibility angle. And always thought the two should merge. And so here we are, having started Ambient at the beginning of this year. So we've only been live since January, but already making some exciting waves.

Awesome, awesome. And yeah, it's, your product is very interesting and how you've kind of merged those two sectors together. But I guess before we get into that, I'm quite curious, how did both of you kind of end up in tech and Web3 in general? What drove you to this part of the world, so to speak?

For me, I have to say I've always had an interest in technology and I've always acted as a business developer but deeply across the technology ecosystem, having from the very beginning worked in technology startups and always having to wear a lot of different hats. And I always found that that was more rewarding and challenging and ultimately what I've come back to wanting to sink my teeth into something bigger here. In Web3, back in 2016 when I originally started to look at the various applications of blockchain and decentralized solutions for the telco and media companies that I was working for and clearly going deep down the rabbit hole and wanting to get involved myself.

Yeah, amazing. And on my end, I've been programming since I was a kid. I think I have a website that I made when I was like 10 or 11 years old if you want to hear my favorite Beatles songs. But yeah, I was just programming and building games with ActionScript 2 and 3 and then studied CompSci in university, did tech internships, and then in early 2017, 2018 started writing Solidity code for EVM and have pretty much been in the space aside from like two years when I was doing a Web2 thing. But we don't talk about that publicly. And so yeah, mostly focused on Web3 infra.

Excellent, excellent. And yeah, always curious to hear how folks kind of ended up where they are. Sounds like both of you had quite the fabulous journey leading up to this point. But as far as I've heard, Ambient Network has an interesting history. Perhaps we could kind of dive into that a little bit before we get into the content you have. Perhaps like a TL;DR of at a high level what is Ambient and like what's the origin story there.

Sure. So Ambient is a decentralized network of environmental monitoring and ambient data. And the origin actually came from a project that was spun out of CERN, very great scientific pedigree. It was one of the original DePINs back some three, four years ago along with Helium that built out a network that was quite successful in its own right for air quality monitoring. But after things started to go south through the market, they never managed to recapture some of that glow and made some of the wrong decisions. But we always saw it also as an opportunity to leverage what had been created and repurpose it for a bigger vision around environmental monitoring. And that's where we are today. We took over an existing network, community, and token. Again, I don't think I've heard of any other projects that have done this, for better and worse. There's pros and cons to that as well. But we rebuilt the technology stack so that it could scale moving forward with the view that we wanted to tackle bigger environmental issues but starting with air quality. And so we'll be able to take you through some of that today because air quality is a small component of the larger environmental monitoring market. So if we're going to be as we really intend to, not only build a blockchain application that actually drives impact, but to build a sustainable DePIN model, then we need to, of course, pursue some of those enterprise relationships and so look at the markets that we can go after.

Excellent, excellent. And yeah, and myself, I used to work in travel so I know all about the environmental concerns of a lot of these things. But yeah, this is a perfect segue to get into your content. So your slides are on screen, so go for it.

Looking good. Thank you very much, Narb. And so, yeah, saying you know a bit of an overview about Ambient. We are building the world's largest decentralized, so DePIN, of environmental and ambient data. We do have an existing network of 10,000 sensors across 20 markets. And actually that 11.5 billion number is already closer to 11.9 billion data streams. We'll be showing you a map next, but ultimately we're targeting opportunities across the environmental monitoring market which is around 25 billion today, forecast to go to 40 billion by 2040. Location data from some of our mobile apps and actually rewarding users for that participation and of course equipping enterprises as well as part of the ESG market, which is significant in its size and there's a lot of opportunity having much greater awareness across the board, just both on the consumer side and professional side of the things, and regulation as well that need to be monitored.

But here is our network to give you an idea. You know, of the 10,000, this is only for the outdoor sensors, 70% of our network is out of Europe, 30% out of the US. And we do plan to significantly expand into the gaps that you see there on the map and increase our density as well because that's of massive value for the weather and environmental data players that we're speaking with from a data perspective.

But why is this important? You know, critical conditions all around us are quite bad. Of course, air pollution has a massive effect. 7 million people plus every year die from bad air quality. We have wildfire instances all across the board. I'm sure being in Vancouver, you know, you experienced that yourself. I did when I was living in the Bay Area in San Francisco. New York, where Gilad lives, also has experienced a lot of that, but also Southeast Asia. Big problem there. And the majority of also Europeans don't realize that 98% live in areas which have a high particulate matter, so well above WHO guidelines. And of course, as we mentioned, Southeast Asia, big issues as we saw recently with India over weeks at a time, right? So it's something that affects us all.

And of course has quite an impact on us, you know, from mood swings to adverse mental health outcomes, depression, productivity losses, lower cognitive performance, and of course reduction in productivity, which with rising temperatures only means that things get worse. So this is not just an issue, you know, something that we're building in blockchain for technology's sake. It is really meant to have again this significant impact across the board.

And so that's where hyperlocal, always on, real-time, decentralized infrastructure creates the opportunity that most centralized organizations would not be able to have unless they have access to that sort of capital and can outlay those networks. So this is where the power of the community really comes in.

We do bring a hybrid DePIN model to the table because as much as we have dedicated hardware and it's permissioned hardware in the sense that we do work with specific device manufacturers. This is not our hardware, even though we do also have plans to create our own form factor, especially to bundle with other DePINs in 2025. But it's hardware that we certify for our network and then we allow folks to onboard with these devices that we offer. We do have both outdoor and indoor variants. The data market is clearly in outdoor today. But it's also sectioned between Tier 1s and Tier 2s, meaning Tier 1 highly populated and dense areas because that's where the most value is from a commercial perspective wanting to analyze the data across those areas. And Tier 2s less populated areas so less commercially relevant, even though there's always the opportunity to create super Xs out of areas that may be of interest to the weather industry. And of course we reward participants based on that daily data feed that we receive back from their sensors.

At the same time, we always envisioned also a quicker way to onboard users that are interested in learning more, in getting greater awareness, in, you know, also acting as a funnel for sensor ownership down the line. But to initially ask them to register with our mobile app, AmbiGo!, which is actually a progressive web app today as initially it was a bit of an experiment and allows us to quickly bring this out. And it's simple in its form. We do have of course intentions to drive that to a native application with far greater engagement and information from our own network, which doesn't exist there today. But ultimately we ask users to help us create this environmental map of the places all around us that we visit every day. And so you can check into the cafe, the restaurant near you, you know, the gym and so on and provide some basic information around the conditions in those places. Now, this is all quite subjective. Over time, you know, we want to actually capture more data specifically, whether through the microphone or the camera because we can start to target noise and light pollution metrics as well as part of that. But it does help us identify, you know, where we should be installing some of these sensors across retail spaces because we do have a strong angle in working with retail partners and deployers. But also, you know, gets folks again to become part of the ecosystem in an easy way and to reward them for that data and over time to get them more involved. So this is an exciting approach that now, you know, we have 24,000 plus users on AmbiGo! which we launched at the end of August. We just passed over 400,000 check-ins. So a great, you know, combination along with our 10,000 sensor network.

And of course we're also very focused on building that demand. Yeah, there's some of those figures. Actually, sorry, 25,000 users. But that's a link if you want to check out the app as well, you can scan that directly. We are monetizing the location data as a revenue stream which of course helps to create value for the network and drive that value back to the users as we do burn tokens and redistribute those revenues. But that being the first port of entry, if you will, then of course there's the sensor network and what we're really capturing there from a scientific perspective as well. The value of the data driven by this hardware and we do have significant plans to expand that over the next few months because we are introducing, you know, as you can see, tens of thousands of low-cost devices with a strong focus also on the ROI that we can expect for participants and ultimately to help us expand the density and the coverage because as you capture in new hexagons, you also get additional rewards and ultimately we want to blanket the world with our sensors but initially focusing on Europe and North America because ultimately that we are speaking with a number of weather players. We have already an environmental data marketplace deal in place that will be announced shortly that will allow for our just our live data because we actually have also four years worth of historic data across our geographies. But to be able to sell our live data to municipalities, to the likes of the aviation industry, to the insurance vertical and so on. And so we'll start to monetize it off of this one marketplace but there's a handful of other marketplaces where this will be available. And this is where it also becomes interesting from a developer perspective, what you can, you know, ultimately build on top of the data that we'll be feeding into or from the network and the APIs that Gilad will be able to speak to in a second. And going back to the enterprise point, we have hundreds of sensors already deployed across the commercial centers like that Japanese Village Plaza in LA, the Best Western hotel in Las Vegas acting as a blueprint for other such locations, commercial centers and hotels. We have the underline, so the public park kind of deployment with the city of Miami there and we're of course have discussions with our advisors, the University of Miami about creating a blueprint for those sort of deployments. But another one, Terribles, which is 100 gas stations across Las Vegas that will give us a city-wide footprint. But we also have 1,000 plus devices across retail spaces that will be announced soon. So I can't quite say what those are but these are massive names you know that we all know that we're very excited to get on board. And there's also opportunities with grant organizations specifically to help them capture data where today there is no such monitoring and to also you know use subsidies for the rewards to offset the free data that would be provided.

Yep. Ultimately, you know, we're a great team in the sense that everybody brings a different component to what we need to achieve. Of course Gilad, great experience across technology and a Web3 native. TJ from a previous founder of CalChip Connect and so great experience across DePIN and Helium ecosystem and so on. And Ivan who was one of the founders of the network that we acquired. So overall, you know, with some fantastic advisors as well. Overall a great skill set across the board.

Along with the rest of the team. Again, we're not big but you know, we're doing so much already. And just wanted to showcase as well of ultimately how all of this flows across the data that we collect across the mobile app and the direct-to-consumer and enterprise devices, how it provides that data which then pushes data sales intelligence and reporting capabilities all the way to how with the same token rewards we're ultimately looking to create an environmental marketplace for the enterprise customers because they're very interested, less interested on the crypto side but more interested on, for example, carbon credits that we can offer them and that they can exchange their tokens into, which builds utility and all of that naturally drives value back into the token and then being redistributed to the participants of the ecosystem that we're building.

And finally, why is this so relevant in our opinion? You know, we're building multiple DePIN networks here. That's the intention down the line because we can become the decentralized version of Tomorrow.io, a massive company in the weather space operationally helping a number of enterprise customers and we can be powered by the DePIN networks of the different sensors that we'll be deploying across the world. So starting with air quality today, but moving into noise and light pollution, pollen and allergens, visibility, wildfire detections. These are all use cases that we've identified through the discussions that we have with the weather industry and so true and real commercial opportunities that we want to explore further. All powered by DePIN again.

And that's a you know a quick overview anyway of what we're building and left some links there as well because we do have our storefront now open as well where we started to sell the indoor sensors with outdoor sensors that will be live shortly. Here is the link again for AmbiGo! and do follow us anyway on Twitter to keep in you know abreast of what we're building. And Gilad, I don't know if you wanted to share a bit more also on the API side. I think I have the data page here already so I'll pull that up.

Yep, amazing. Thanks so much.

Excellent, excellent. I guess while we're pulling that up, Andreas has a great question. What are your thoughts, I guess both your thoughts, on 2025 possibly being a big year for crypto regulations and any specific impacts on Solana that might affect your network?

No, regulation is driving a lot of interest and demand in the services that we provide. You know, it's driving a lot more enterprise interest and use case, so especially in Europe, California as well, it does vary by region. But that's why the ESG opportunity is such a big one and will be quite big for us specifically. We do work with a number of device manufacturers that also bring us in into some of the deals that we identify. And we have some fantastic strategic partners and investors that help us expand the network through those enterprise solutions that are again very much driven by regulation. But over time, I think there's also an opportunity to, especially for indoor, because there is no indoor data market today as such. But you go on Google and you see how busy is a place. I think we'll with our data, we can get to a place where you'll be able to see especially more polluted areas outside, what is the air quality indoor? What is the noise pollution like? What is the light level like? So that you'll be able to filter through that data across some of the OpenTable, Booking.com and Google platforms and what not. But yeah, we do see as 2025 as a big year of adoption for what we're building.

Yeah, and just to zoom out as well, I think in the past a lot of entrepreneurs and developers in the space have been a little bit wary of building crypto startups just because the regulation is often unclear with a lot of potential recourse. So the SEC, for example, went after companies like Ripple (XRP) and Uniswap. And so, you know, you might try to follow the rules and still get into legal trouble. And so that's why we ended up with a lot of companies in the space that were located outside of the US formally. And I think overall a better space for crypto regulation means more innovation in the space, and we're excited to be part of that innovation.

Cool. Awesome. Great question, great answer. Yeah. Should we jump into the data page then?

Let's do it.

Cool. So quick high level. As Luca mentioned, we are a network of these sensors. Maybe Luca in a bit if you want to pull up like the shop just to show what the sensors are, because I think it's not always clear exactly what these sensors are. So the model is that people are buying these sensors, which you just plug in and connect to the internet and onboard to our platform. And then it starts streaming a lot of data points to our platform. So we're talking about temperature, humidity, air pollution, air quality, a variety of different data points on environmental data. And we're able to, you know, aggregate this data and access it and then make it accessible in our API. So what Luca's doing is showing kind of some of the sensors that people can buy now. But we can jump back to the data pages as well.

So this is the data page right now, just like a quick introduction, kind of doing a quick overview about what sort of data we have. But let's actually jump into, at the bottom there's a link to our Swagger docs. So let's jump in there. So right now we're actively making some updates to our infrastructure and to our API docs and API infrastructure. So this is sort of the current setup of where we're at, but we're excited to have a more robust solution in the future. But I do want to kind of jump through high level this data page because I think there's a lot of potential applications that could be built on top of this data. Because we're building a network of decentralized environmental and climate data, and this unlocks the ability for developers to build cool things on top of it. So specifically what I would suggest is the GET request for sensors data if we open that up. So it's like the tenth one. The one above that, the GET request. Yeah. Yeah. So if you scroll down a little bit you can see an example output for the sensor data. So you can see the sensor ID, the GPS, and all the data points. If you keep scrolling a little bit more down. Was it this one? You might need to scroll inside of the box. Scroll up a little bit. It might not be that one anymore. It should be, otherwise we can do sensor raw as well. Oh, sensor data, not sensors, sorry, two more up. There we go. Thanks. Yep.

So we have all these data points that are accessible with our API, so for example humidity, PM refers to the particle so 2.5 or 10. And so what we're doing right now is we're using this data to just show it on the map view, so we could walk through that in a minute. But it's very interesting like what sort of applications can be built on top of this data. It's a simple easy-to-use RESTful JSON API. Right now you'd need to contact us to get an API key that would be able to access this API. I'm most excited about the real-time data aspect so you can query real-time, you know, what are the sensors like in New York City or in, you know, Amsterdam, or wherever you want. But we also have data going back as well for a couple years. And so we're actively trying to work with different companies in the space to, you know, work on distributing our data to them. But I do think it's really exciting that we can open this up to developers to work with this as well. So right now, this is like the API that we have right now, but we're actively working on building a developer portal, so a simple way for any developer to provision an API key, select a plan, and start consuming our API, which is something that we'll be working on and we'll be launching in the near future. So we're really excited about that for not just B2B but also just hobbyist developers because I think there's a lot of interesting applications that could be built. All people need is some idea of what to build. So obviously feel free to reach out to us with any sort of ideas or requests for getting access to the API. Personally I think the sensor data is the most interesting. We do some ML calibration on the sensor data, so this endpoint's probably most interesting. If we close this dropdown out you can see a overview of what sort of endpoints we have. What we do right now is we break up the entire earth into different hexagons and so sensors fall into different hexagons on the earth and that's how we kind of segment the map, segment the earth for like the GPS locations. I think that's pretty much it. The other endpoints are mostly around like organizing the organizations. But yeah, otherwise maybe Luca you just want to jump into the map view and you can talk about the map as well.

Yeah, and so I was saying earlier, this is you know our map entirely. We do have a few spots of folks that have taken the outdoor sensors elsewhere in the world outside of our core areas, but it's primarily Europe and the US and these are our core markets today as we need to if anything increase the coverage and density across these two areas before exploring going elsewhere. But this also only represents our outdoor sensors because we do have another few thousands of units that that are for indoor and at some point we do believe again there's a data opportunity there and I think that could be quite exciting to explore also with the help of the community out there. So looking forward to to get everyone's ideas and to feel free to get in touch as we open up our APIs and make this data more readily accessible. Can't wait to see what folks also end up building on top of it.

Yeah, yeah, awesome, awesome. I guess that was one of my questions around like where and how the data is stored. So Edison is asking, in the past the data was with this project was saved on-chain. How does that work now and how do you ensure the data is not tampered with?

So I'll let Gilad expand on what I'm about to say, but historically the data was actually on-chain. It was based on Algorand where it was a lot easier also, you know, rather than Solana to do some of this or less expensive anyway. At the moment, you know, a lot of that data has been recentralized in AWS. But we are looking to create oracles out of that data in the near future and to use more decentralized solutions as part of that. There are also, you know, secure components within some of these sensors that certify that, sorry, encrypt the data and we're able to, you know, at least have that certainty that the data's not been tampered. So yeah, that's what I would say. Gilad, anything to add?

Yeah, I think we definitely have goals to decentralize in the future, especially in line with the ethos of crypto, you know, for more and more decentralization that's like the overarching goal. I think right now we skew towards more of a trusted setup where, you know, we're storing a lot of data in OpenSearch, ElasticSearch on AWS amongst other locations. There's obviously pros and cons. I think in terms of authenticity of data, that's very important especially as you become decentralized more and more over time and there are tools that can help us accomplish that whether whether it's executing logic in TEEs or leveraging succinct proofs and zero-knowledge proofs to verify the authenticity of the data and the work that's being done by these sensors. So overall stay tuned, but we're excited about what we're building.

Awesome. And I guess a tangent question on this is was there a particular reason you picked Solana over sticking with Algorand versus perhaps a Layer 2 or Layer 3 solution?

I think first of all Solana, you know, has built a great DePIN ecosystem that we wanted to be part of. They're also a great marketing machine, you know, with a lot of great exposure and we wanted to be able to tap into that. Of course they're also an investor which which doesn't hurt. And so we get a lot of great support from the foundation in broadcasting our message and narrative in what we're building. So all of those things I think were very relevant in how do we get the you know how do we drive the most impact for the network and for the mission that we're building.

Yeah, and just to add on to that too, by being on the same network, it increases interoperability and composability. And so as DePIN is really being centralized around Solana for for a lot of it, it begs the questions like what will it look like when there's interoperability and composability between things like Hivemapper and Ambient Network and Helium. Like how how will people use these applications together or build applications that treat these DePIN infrastructures as building blocks? So we're excited to be part of that future.

Excellent, great tag, great answer. And then one more question from the crowd. Do you guys have any plans to task out Amotube users to check out nearby areas? I think probably a third-party sensor.

Amotube is a sensor that is supported by a network, it's a portable device. We have decided to stop, you know, selling it anyway or increasing the network through Amotubes. Even though we do continue to support it partly because the value of the data is not as valuable. So, you know, we are keen on expanding more of the outdoor footprint and Amotubes generally as much as they are portable, folks typically tend to just keep them at home because they're just nice devices and sure you can bring it outside, but it would need to be constantly traveling outside to have some value and even then, you know, there is a question of how valuable is a moving monitor as opposed to the one that is fixed and constantly measuring continuously monitoring that space. So, you know, we are supporting the existing ones on our network but are no longer expanding that footprint.

Gotcha, gotcha. Great question, great answer once again. Yeah, unfortunately this brings us to time. I will bring up your slide once again for people to be able to scan. And I guess final question for me is if people are keen to start playing around with the API, what's the best way for them to start? How can they get an API key? How can they reach out if they need help?

hello@ambient.network, Twitter, wherever you are.

All right. Excellent. I love it. Short and to the point. Yeah, I guess with that, thank you so much Luca and Gilad for coming on the show. This was a very, very interesting project and one that I think is very is going to be very impactful for our globe. As you know, there's a lot of environmental concerns a lot of folks have, so having a lot of data to kind of signal those concerns and help us action on things is going to be very crucial. And I love I love it being powered by blockchain technology too. And yeah, I guess with that I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend, and we'll catch you back here on DevNTell next week. And next week we're going to have a special event DevNTell where we are going to see all the Rootstock grant winners showcase their projects. So you'll definitely not want to miss that. But yes, we will catch you all here on next week. All right all, see you.

Thank you so much for hosting.