Giga: (UN)DePIN to connect every school in the world by christopher fabian | Devcon SEA

[Music] you have about you have a whole bunch of school connectivity content coming up for the next few presentations and the reason that I'm so excited to be here um is that we've had a long collaboration with the ethereum foundation with the community of Builders here um and over the last six or seven years we've come to a place where we're able as a project to talk about some really exciting things in deep in just want to ask about my timer I think the timer's off by a little bit um I wanted to show you this picture this is a picture of school connectivity this is a picture of school connectivity in Panama um each dot is a school on here the red dots are schools that are not connected to the internet the green dots are schools that are connected to the internet and this is the type of map and data that our project generates about the world um it's the first time that we've ever been able to see the world through the map map of digital infrastructure we have this map now for about 40 countries um and you're able to see in real time whether or not human beings are connected to the internet and that's really important and I'll tell you why it's important um about a third of people in the world have no internet connection at all that means that they're not able we just heard in the last presentation about the lack of nodes in Africa for example um if you don't have internet if you don't have access to gigabytes uh you're not able to be part of the economy that we're all talking about over the last few days and more than half of the world's schools particularly don't have this access our project is called Giga it's a collaboration between UNICEF and the international telecommunications Union and we focus specifically on making sure that schools are connected um we've been around for about five years we've connected in the last two years about 12,000 schools it's about 7 million kids and we've helped to pull together about $ 1.7 billion dollar in financing for school connectivity uh in the countries that we're working in we've helped to reduce the cost of connectivity by more than 50% and increase the speed of connectivity in schools because it's often very very low where it even does exist and interestingly we've mapped about 2.1 million schools nobody in the world knows how many schools there are total we think they're between five and seven million but there is no complete map so when we do map schools in a country we're often the first point of Truth for a government um because they don't have an exact number of their schools and since we're working with connectivity with trying to get people online and young people online and give them access to opportunity and choice our unit of measure our commodity is the gigabyte which is interesting because it's one of the few G you know Commodities assets that's fully digital uh from end to end uh this is what I'm going to talk about in the next part of the presentation which is that we can if if something is digital because something is digital we can talk about it in a very different way than when we're talking about physical uh assets real world assets and we're very very excited to be launching a new piece of Giga a new piece of our architecture in the next year and that pieces our connectivity credits Marketplace um I'll spend just a few minutes talking about what that means for us but essentially it means wrapping the gigabyte in a way that we can start to create price transparency if you look at the price for the gigabyte in Zimbabwe for example it's about 70 times the price of a gigabyte in Kenya um and that massive price disparity creates huge pockets of unfairness it's not true just between countries it's also true within countries poor people always end up paying more for the things that wealthy people either pay very little for or don't even think about at all and so I'm going to just walk through what we're doing in the space of of building a system to tokenize gigabytes uh the exciting thing is that this platform is now up and running in its prototype stages in four different places so I'll talk about that a little bit too um as we're going through this process of of building and our team is about 30 people working on the tech and Engineering side in Barcelona and another 40 people in Geneva so it's a fairly sizable group working on Giga um with a real focus of about five or six of us on on this particular Marketplace so when you purchase connectivity for schools when you purchase connectivity for health centers we also work with with governments for hospitals and health centers we're working because the prime minister or the head of state or the Minister of Finance or education has asked us to be there and to help them create this connectivity that allows us to have access on the buy side and governments spend a lot of money doing this anyway it's just often not very well spent we also have a lot of sell-side companies the people who are actually providing that connectivity these are mobile network operators internet service providers and others and so what we've created as Giga is a way to connect the buyers and sellers of this commodity this digital commodity and we're doing this in various ways in various countries but an example of that um is that you have a government like Rwanda one of our champion governments and herban will be talking a little bit about the work we're doing there uh later who is procuring gigabytes from a variety of of different companies in Rwanda we also have a set of sellers uh that are everything from a small ISP to Large mobile network operators that Pro are providing this and because we have a privileged Place through the United Nations because we're part of Unicef we're able to negotiate on behalf of the government for aggregated purchasing um of of gigabytes of this commodity and kind of create that market the second part after kind of identified what the what the need is is to figure out what the commodity is itself because of this map which I described at the beginning and we've now we've built the open source stack to find schools from outer space so we use high resolution satellite imagery we've built our own ML on top of that to figure out what a school building is we're able to tell you in real time if the school is connected based on both uh some Appliance stuff that we've we've built and uh and and things that we can install behind the router in the school as well as connecting with network operators through their apis and and and other kind of larger systems we're able to actually um talk about a gigabyte in situ in as it's being used and see whether or not a school is connected you can imagine uh already we're working with governments to when a school turns green to issue payment automatically if it turns red you issue a warning that's a sort of smart contract based under layer that we've built as well um but we can start to do things with this digital asset and if you grab that the QR code you can go and search and look on the map you can see all of the countries that we're in you can try to find the school that you went to it should be there if it's in one of the 34 countries that we've already started working in um and if you want to tokenize a commodity you also have to think about that market cycle where the where the commodity sits in it um we stole this from the carbon credits Market carbon credits sort of work uh they don't work all the way but they uh they give you an idea of how you can create a sort of recirculation one of the reasons carbon credits don't work that well is it's very hard to um figure out where they're being used and where they're being you know where where trees are absorbing carbon the the asset itself the metric ton equivalent of metric carbon uh equivalent is not a real thing it's a kind of synthetic thing that we've created um but with a gigabyte we can actually talk about the asset and we can do this whole cycle which goes from somebody saying they want to to do something they want to give gigabytes out or deploy gigabytes to somebody purchasing that and we can watch that whole cycle happen uh through the marketplace so that's a sort of second step is figuring out how to tokenize the thing the third part of building a Marketplace is actually building the tooling itself um and so we're pretty excited that we are setting this up right now in Geneva um we picked Geneva for a variety of reasons but uh it has allowed us to really be based in this very structured very regulated system that is respected around the world um for certification so we know that if you want to certify a farm for pulling carbon in from the from the air uh you need to go through a certain process same thing for a gigabyte you need to know that a school has has been connected a Health Center's been connected and somebody needs to stamp that in in our system we have the United Nations and all of our partner governments who are able to provide that certification we're also building this in various countries with their own National Credit Systems if you work with connectivity at all you've heard of something called a universal service fund or universal access fund those are ways that governments uh are ready pay for school connectivity uh in poor areas they just don't work very well because they're sort of black boxes and you can't see inside to what's been done whether the money that gets taxed from Network operators actually goes and gets deployed or not um we also have this Marketplace that we're starting to launch we've actually just sold a few weeks ago we sold our first credits which is very exciting it's a very small amount of credits in one country um but we're starting to see Buyers work with us uh sort of offline right now but it's but it's beginning um and then we're looking at what the protocol and the governance can be for all of that um the other thing you have to do if you're building a Marketplace is you also have to you also have to figure out who's going to be who's going to take part of it we've identified in this whole system um a set of of of actors that's everything from the government Ministries who are already buying connectivity for their schools and health centers um to the sellers the isps new new new isps or network operators coming in groups like starlink to old ones the incumbent operators um as well as investors who would want to be part of a kind of marketplace environment and we've already started stacking these up in four countries um five countries which is really exciting so in each of these countries we're building a small prototype of this Marketplace which is really a onetoone relationship between a seller and a buyer in that country for school connectivity and what we're saying is essentially this if you are somebody who's going to connect schools you're a small ISP internet service provider or not Network operator and you want to connect those schools all the way over there but they're really far away it's expensive and you don't maybe have the money to outlay the capital at first we'll give you a credit for connecting the school and the further away it is the more credits you're going to get it's up in a mountain more credits there's no electricity more credits and so on so you as a small ISP can go and do all of that hard work knowing that you're at some point going to get repaid at the same time we go to the government we go to the Minister of Finance others in the government and we say if we bring you these credits at the end of the year and if a company brings them to you you will go and give that company a tax break you'll reduce their corporate tax you'll give them some kind of incentive for doing that and the government says okay and so between those two we create a system where we're able to fairly Mark that the commodity has been delivered even before all of the work has been done and the service provider knows that by the time they connect that school or that Health Center that's so far away that nobody wants to connect it they'll actually get paid back so we put up here just a few of the different use cases uh that we have for and and sort of those those pairing of users that we're that we're building for in in different countries um some of them use the universal service fund as the backing some of them use corporate tax and some of them use uh things that are already in place like National fiber as the asset that gets paid off so for example you could say if you connect those schools far away your credit will buy you access will buy you free access to the National fiber backbone or a place on somebody's cell tower or their Mast and this is pretty exciting so these four or five Pilots are getting getting instantiated now built out now we're going to learn of over the next year what works and what doesn't and then we get to start to bring in a much larger group of players because a Marketplace doesn't work with just one buyer and one seller that's not a very good Market um the idea is that these credits can really become digital infrastructure credits they can become um used by anybody who wants to start to connect new communities we just heard about node bias against poor places um if you have an interest in connecting something and getting it on the network and creating a node in any sense whether it's a data center or if you're trying to do Edge AI or if you're trying to put an ethereum node up you need to have connectivity and so we can start to create a dynamic in that um which rewards people for connecting and allows for the things the people that need to be connected uh to be connected cheaper and I just want to just I'll tell you a quick story about why that's so important so this is a school in Kenya this is a school in a place called nun kapir which is actually it's only about 15 kilometers so that's that's not quite that far from from Nairobi it's a it's a school that we help to connect we help the Kenyan government connected last year so this is the school if you're looking at this if you're kind of if the school is in back of you and you look across the road there are power cables there's fiber somewhere a little bit over there but it was never connected to the internet it was never connected to to electricity um and one of the reasons schools often in warm places and sunny places aren't connected to electricity is that you don't you don't need it because you're in school during the day when the sun is out and you just have the windows open and it was never a thing before but with these with this ability of ours to work with the government we were able to help the government create locate this school create the financing for it um and do something pretty pretty incredible so there is a server there it has the Giga logo on it it also has liquid telcoms logo on it liquid is one of those infrastructure providers who I mentioned and in order for them to connect the school they needed to borrow space on somebody else's cell tower and they were able to do an internal swap of resources with that other service provider the ones who made the cell tower so liquid could put up their long-distance Wi-Fi radio on the tower and that's a a version of connectivity credits that happen sort of organically um in the school itself and we see this across the world as we're connecting Schools attendance goes up once you start connecting because if you're in a school if you're a 14-year-old in a school and you're learning nothing and the teacher as is the case in many countries the teacher can't even really read a paragraph of the you know of of a text in the language of instruction well you know that you're being ripped off you know that your time is being used unfairly and you are angry so you know you shouldn't be there um as soon as there's connectivity you're able to do something you're able to borrow somebody's phone do something a little bit on it and you know there's a potential for a future we've also seen School results increase by mean this school is about 10% even without the full digital curriculum being put in place and we don't do anything inside the school so Giga does not do any of the work withed edtech or teacher training that's all other parts of Unicef that do that there are experts who do that type of work but we just bring the kind of connectivity in and the the last thing that's really interesting in this story is that this is the main teacher her name is Paris she said that she's able to save about 4 hours a month because she doesn't have to go to an internet cafe to enter in the grades and the attendance and all that kind of stuff that she had to do before there was connectivity in her school um and so that's all important that's why we're why we're doing this work from a technical point of view the ability to tokenize gigabytes proves a few things that tokenizing other traditional real world assets doesn't I think um one is that we can talk about standards because in this particular case unlike carbon credits it's very easy there's one agency that does Internet it's the international telecommunications Union there's another that looks at school connectivity that's UNICEF so together there's really only two groups that do the standard setting for it um often real world assets it's hard to figure out like the user interest of the real world asset itself you know there are a few of us who want to buy a very small percentage of a physical painting and think that's important or a part of an apartment building uh in general that hasn't hit retail yet but a gigabyte is broken down into a megabyte and down to a kilobyte those things already kind of work um and you can validate this stuff in real time you can see it on the map that I showed all of you um so you can see whether or not this asset is moving which is nice for an investor um somebody who's looking at getting their infrastructure built out and that you know that ability to see things in real time is pretty important and finally as I said in earlier in the presentation having this backing from the Swiss government is very very helpful so we're hosted by the government of Spain Catalonia and Barcelona to build our technology and by the government of Switzerland and the Canton of Geneva to set up this particular piece of work the connectivity credits Marketplace um we've been we've been having the meetings that we need with all the regulators and legal folks um and Switzerland is very very good at structuring regulation which is why there's so many folks in zoo already um we believe that Geneva has a unique place as a center of international um Commerce in in Switzerland as well and uh and so it's really a delight to be there I wanted to leave a few minutes for questions um before that I would just say there are a variety of ways for this community to be involved one of them obviously is uh just being a contributor to the different repositories that we have um we are delighted to to be working with the open source community and on a variety of levels the second is that as we talk about impact and impact tokens and others who are doing that type of work they they find this layer that we're building something that they can build on top of so people working on environmental tokens can use schools as monitoring hubs and so on um the third is you may know um folks in countries who want to be part of this there may be infrastructure providers that you work with um who are interested in in being part of this or there may be governments who would like to experiment with a new way to connect their populations so really delighted to have spent that time um sharing this project with you harbin's going to talk a little bit more about how we've been working with the ethereum community on staking in a little bit but we have a few minutes for questions as well thank you so much for listening this afternoon so we have 3 minutes left or question for this one I see one hand over there oh that's a long distance for me oh don't s you want to do it I hit somebody in the head with one of these boxes once and it was really I know if you want me to throw it okay do it I'll throw the microphone that gentleman over there in the back yeah wow you're so good thank you for the introduction so I think digital Marketplace it works when uh we don't know who will be the seller and buyer and and Marketplace work as interface between the seller and boy but in this case uh I think you already know who will be the buyer buyer will be the government and seller will be the telecom companies but if do you have any other reason that you're introducing the marketplace here it's a great question so if I'm just if I just want to sell my goats to you we can start off that way and at least we know that the goat is worth something right and before I sell you my first goat and you give me the money we have no idea that the goat is actually worth anything but after that we've established that there is some transaction we're at that stage now so we want to just see and know that this commodity can be moved digitally because right now the way it's accounted for is terrible but the idea is to open that up and to have a lot of different goats and a lot of different buyers in the next phase it's just you can't start by building that unless we at least price out the goat and know that that trans first transaction can work and so that is the government and the and the ISP but later on it becomes the people around the ISP the other the folks doing data centers all of that who can be on the buy and on the sell side probably sorry but we're on a super tight schedule uh and that's it for our question for this session uh the next sharing will will also be about Giga so after the two sharing maybe you can gather your questions together and then go to Chris over there let's give Chris another round of applause thank you Chris uh