Exclusive Coinvision Interview with DAV’s Founder and CEO Noam Copel
This week, Coinvision sat down to talk with Noam Copel, the CEO and Founder of DAV Network, a project bringing autonomous vehicles and decentralized ride-hailing transportation services to the blockchain. After successfully completing a transaction with an autonomous drone in Moscow last month, the team just launched their network today (May 30th).
This is what Noam had to share about DAV and the future:
Coinvision: What differentiates your project from other blockchain projects working in the peer-to-peer transportation sector?
Noam: The DAV project is different in a number of important ways. Perhaps the most significant difference is in the depth of the outcome — the DAV network will do for the transportation sector what the Web did for the information sector.
Enterprises on the network such as decentralized ride-hailing and deliveries by automated drones are the obvious, first-order opportunities.
Noam: But just like with the Web, the depth of opportunities that will arise on the DAV network will transform the economy, and predicting these vast second- and third-order opportunities will be difficult! Search-and-recovery services for failed drones; custom, on-the-fly insurance services; arbitration services, and so many others will appear out of necessity and opportunity.
Coinvision: Which real-world challenges inspired you to create DAV? How can blockchain technology provide new and better solutions for these challenges?
Noam: Silos, or gatekeepers, are a major source of frustration in the markets. Both buyers and sellers have to struggle with information asymmetry that is encouraged by the middlemen. Blockchain technology offers a terrific opportunity to recreate the market without powerful gatekeepers removing choices from buyers. The decentralizing nature of blockchain provides us with a trustless environment in which to interact and transact, which leads us to vast opportunities in the mobility space.
Coinvision: Last month, DAV announced a major milestone when a drone autonomously negotiated a pick-up and drop-off on the blockchain. Please describe this event?
Noam: What happened during this first experiment is that a user opened the app, and asked for bids from real drones in Moscow. A number of different (real and simulated) drones responded with bids, and the user chose a simulated drone to complete the delivery. Next, a smart contract was signed on the Ethereum blockchain between the user and the drone, and DAV tokens were transferred from the user to the contract. At this point a simulated drone completed the mission. The user approved the mission and the DAV tokens were transferred to the drone’s wallet. The whole transaction was recorded on the Ethereum blockchain, as was the DAV identity of the user and the drones.
Coinvision: What impact will the use of smart-contract bound transportation services have on the pricing of transportation services?
Price-finding will still take place as it would in a normal market economy. What the smart contracts may help with is reducing overhead and overall costs within the economy. Losses due to non-payment, theft and over- or under-charging could vanish almost entirely.
Coinvision: What challenges do you see in terms of conflict solving within this decentralized ecosystem? Who moderates the responsibility for a drone malfunctioning or a package getting damaged?
Noam: Conflict resolution is a service that will be provided by professional arbitrators on the DAV network. It may be a service that’s part-and-parcel of what insurers provide, which is who we plan to be the ones dealing with the consequences of failed missions or payload damage.
Coinvision: Which partnerships have you already established or are looking to establish to further develop DAV?
Noam: We have close to twenty DAV Alliance members — partners who are stakeholders in the decentralized autonomous vehicle space. These currently include shipping & logistics companies, drones-as-a-service companies, last meter solution providers, route mapping service providers, rover innovators, drone designers, AI & roadway sensing developers, and more. We’re in negotiations with some top-tier organizations and expect that good things to come out of those discussions. We invite anyone who is in this vertical and interested in DAV to reach out to us. We’d love to hear from them.
Coinvision: What can users and supporters expect from your team in the short term after the crowd sale?
Noam: After the token sale is complete the entire DAV team will be re-aligning to engage fully in the work of building and developing. R&D will be further developing the DAV protocol and all of the associated tools and libraries, marketing and communications will be raising awareness and sharing our progress, and business development will be busy forging partnerships and enabling innovators and enterprises. It’ll be more of what we’re already doing, with the considerable resources and attention that were once directed at the token sale reallocated for expanding and reinforcing the DAV Foundation and the project itself.
Coinvision: More broadly, what is your expectation for DAV in the long-term? Describe your vision of the future when the network is fully deployed and operational? What will it mean for users?
Noam:
“Ultimately our expectation is that everyone who wants it will have access to sophisticated mobility services at their fingertips, due to increasingly lower barriers to entry”
This has such huge, positive ramifications for society, including more economic opportunities for all of us and extending the period of independence for seniors considerably. Some people won’t own any sort of vehicle and will just hire them for mobility missions, whether that’s to move something or to move them. There will be large fleets of decentralized ride-hailing vehicles and single-vehicle enterprises. We’ll see drones that deliver small-footprint urgent goods and drones that deliver heavy freight. Drones will be widely used to do vertical infrastructure inspections or film production — we’re already seeing some of that today. All of these services will reshape our urban centres and help make them more livable.
“The long-term vision is not without some irony. When DAV is everywhere, when it has fulfilled its purpose of providing decentralized, global access to mobility services, no one will talk about it, much like how no one talks about TCP/IP even though it’s the very thing that drives the World Wide Web”
And that’s it from our talk with Noam Copel, CEO and Founder of DAV Network, a project currently featured on our ICO Top 20. We will continue to follow their work with great interest. Stay tuned for our upcoming updates, articles and interviews and follow our Coinvision Premium Discord community to be the first to get alerts about high ROI opportunities.
Disclaimer
We are stating our vision and opinions, we are not giving you financial advice and if you invest in this project it is your full responsibility. You are investing at your own risk. Always invest only what you can afford to lose and try to diversify your investments. Finally, do your own homework and learn about the project use case, roadmap and team.
Originally published at www.coinvision.co.
