Cardano Could Give Every Bike a Digital Identity and It Actually Makes Sense

Okay, everyone, we’ve got a really interesting project coming up here in this interview. I have Bartek joining me from BikeID and we’re going to learn about how digital IDs tie into the bike industry and how this is going to bring in a lot of users onto the chain. So I want to get a really good understanding about this and I’ve got a lot of questions here as well. But Bartek, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having us. It’s fantastic to be here. Now I’ve got a lot of questions about this project and I saw it come up on my radar, I think last year. And I want to know how you got into the ecosystem with this project and then what problem you guys are solving.

How does blockchain tie into all this as well? So please give me a bit of background about yourself and the project. I mean, what we’re doing is pretty straightforward, pretty simple. We are giving every bicycle a digital ID.

Simple might sound simple, but it really is a lot of consequences. I mean, imagine if you had a car with a VIN, because every car, every car has a VIN and the VINs are analog. You can’t write against them. You need like third party software in order to write any events to the VIN, right?

Here we are at a much better position. Bicycles do not have VINs. They have all sorts of different numbers, different systems. Every manufacturer has a different system of numbering and then you have retailers on top of this who are trying to impose their own systems.

It’s a bit of a mess, which is holding this whole industry behind a lot, okay? So there is a situation. Now why we decided to go with blockchain is very simple, because if you are doing something like this, proof is on you. And if you were a private business like we are, everybody is going to ask you a question, who are you?

To actually say that it is what it is. With blockchain, we removed this whole situation because it is what it is. You don’t have that central authority to say, I’m the boss, I’m the one that holds the keys, the database. That’s the beauty of decentralized systems, right?

So you have that. There is a market that really needs a common identification. There are governments or you have EU and so on, who are extremely slow in kind of getting together and figuring out what to do. And on the other hand, you have technology, which is the right moment is there.

Because right now we have the tools, we have the knowledge, we have blockchain, we have AI. We’re able to build very, very fast, very effective and efficient solutions that are completely trustless. You don’t have to say, okay, trust me, bro, this number is that, but that bike, no, it’s just there. Simple.

So yeah, so that’s why we chose to build on blockchain, because to us, it’s the basis for whatever else we do. That’s why proof-of-bike. Okay. That makes sense to me.

Essentially every bike has a digital ID provable by blockchain and no central authority around it. Okay. That makes sense. So the question for me here is how’s the bike have that identification tied to it?

Like a car, like it’s got a VIN number and it’s stamped in there and it’s like engraved into the chassis of the car. What about the bike? Does it have anything like that? I’ve got two bikes in my hallway.

I don’t think it’s got any serial numbers on there at all. I’d have to check. It does have serial numbers. If you have more modern or more expensive bicycles, every part will have a serial number.

The serial numbers will be either engraved or there will be a QR code sticker or whatnot on a different part. The main one is obviously the frame number. However, we are using RFID and NFC tags in order to mark the bikes. These are specifically developed in the lab by us.

It’s proprietary technology because in order for a tag, NFC or RFID tag to work on a bicycle, they need to sustain high temperature. They need to be able to, by high temperature, I mean like very high because in production line the bicycles go through the oven. So it took a lot of R&D. They have to be super durable.

They have to be flexible, go around the frame. They need to work on metal because not all the bikes are carbon. And more importantly, they need to be super cheap to manufacture. But in order for these tags to work, just a tag means nothing.

To us, the tag is just an interface. It is like you have your VIN engraved on the chassis of the car. It is not an interface. You have to scan it with your phone, you have to take a picture, you have to write it down.

Your fingers become the interface because you’re writing down the VIN. This is the sticker. The tag being the interface, so you can easily tap it if that’s on the NFC. You can easily scan it as the bike goes, for example, through the production line, goes through RFID gates.

So we know each step of the production. When it goes to warehouse, we know how many bikes we have, what type of bike we have and so on. So we’re looking after the entire value chain by applying these simple interfaces that make it automated to just the face, to the digital cloud where the whole information about the bicycle and all the events about the bicycle sit. Okay.

All right. That makes a little bit more sense. First off, I think I need a more expensive bike to kind of understand the whole tagging of the bike system first. So that’s one thing.

But what you’re talking about there also is that whole supply chain tracking that we’ve seen, you know, Cardano do before with wines, with coffee as well. Amergo did a project around that, a case study around that as well. So this ties into all of that flow too. So that’s really interesting, but you also mentioned like a database for this production flow too.

So this doesn’t quite tie into or is on top of the blockchain side of things, isn’t it? And it sounds like to me that this is also a product that your company could be selling to bike companies and production companies out there. Is that what I’m seeing here? I mean, if we were the size of Palantir or something like this, probably we would.

But right now we’re focused on becoming the enabler. We are the hammer that you can work with, you know, a simple tool. And we just, we’re just doing what it says on the tin. So, so imagine you were a manufacturer, you have your ERP system, you have your PIM system information system, you have your CRM and so on and so forth, right?

So you’re a manufacturer, then you have the brand with their own systems. Then you have the retailer with even more systems. Now, you have an asset, you have an asset that goes through all these, all this value chain, you want to ensure, and especially that the brand might have a number, a lot of different manufacturers, the retailer might have a whole lot of different suppliers. And, and what you need is one single kind of a hook that you can use in order to connect everything together.

About, about a month ago, we, we launched with a media expert who are a very large chain of shops in central Europe. And they, among other stuff like fridges and TVs, they’re also selling bicycles. Now imagine being a retailer, you might have a number of suppliers who are sending you bicycles. And these bicycles in the modern world, they need to have a digital representation in order for them to exist in your ERP systems, your CRM systems and so on.

So this is what we are bringing to the mix. We’re bringing kind of an order to the chaos. Now, what it means, it is a snowball effect because let’s say we’re working with one of the suppliers. We also working with one media, one retailer.

The retailer has a number of different suppliers of bicycles. So what happens next? Right now, it was a month ago. And right now they are already contacting their suppliers for them to adhere to the same standards.

Like I said, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a bit of a snowball effect and a network effect as well. Also, you know, we’re going to see probably, you know, with DPP regulation, you know, the kind of a top, top down approach from the, from EU that the organizations, what they are going to do is try to make this business case where a bottom up DPP standardization is going to work for them. And that’s where we are coming in, you know, not necessarily imposing the regulations on everybody, but it just makes business sense to, to the organizations, to the, to the businesses. Great.

Okay. That makes sense to me. That’s, that’s brilliant. Capture, you can capture a lot of the suppliers out there for sure for these bike manufacturers and make it really easy for the stores and retailers and everything else around this.

That’s really cool. What’s, what’s your timeline looking like? Are you rolling this out? You said you’re doing a lot of research for the NFC RFID chips and whatnot.

Are they in production? Are they rolling out? Have you got lots of customers? What’s it look like?

So we’ve already launched the, the tags. We have manufactured them. Right now we are actually, that’s, that’s a good question because right now we’re working on something super cool. And in our lab, we, we’re building a jewel tag, which is a combination of an RFID NFC in one very small thin tag, which is, we don’t talk about much, but I’m, I can, I can only say, yeah, yeah, no, it’s actually, I can give you, give you a bit of a, of a, of an insight into our kitchen.

This is something called a super exciting. But yeah, we do have customers. We are working with manufacturers. We are already working with retailers with a whole number of them.

Last year we registered 300 something thousand bicycles on our platform. This year, I think we’re going to grow to over a million. I mean, the dynamics are looking really cool. In terms of, in terms of technology, I wish technology would be catching up as fast as our business development goes.

But we’re trying to, we’re trying to make these two things. And then also we have another thing, which is the, this whole regulatory outreach that we are having. So we’re working towards that. So we’re working with governments, we’re working with the EU commission and so on in order to make this whole standard kind of adhere to the DPP regulations, digital passport regulations.

Now with all that customers and registrations of the bikes coming through your business, how does that translate to Cardano? Do we see a transaction per bike being registered with digital ID? What does that look like? From a Cardano user here, we want adoption.

We want transactions. We want activity on the chain. What does that translate to in terms of Cardano activity? Okay.

So we have already built our proof of concept to put the bicycles on chain. However, given our scale, it doesn’t make any sense for us to register every single bicycle with every single measurement. We have 1 million bicycles this year. Okay.

We are calculating approximately between 10 and 15 events per bicycle will be recorded on the, so in order to build this out, we have to think scale, we have to think cost and we don’t want the cost to go through the roof. If we were putting every bicycle on the main net, we would go bust in the space of a month probably. Now we’re working to build a middleware which would repackage, put the events on the partner chain that they are building and then record a portion of the bicycles on main net. That’s the bottom line.

Right. So we’re talking, so it’s about the scale. We also put the documents supporting every event. So let’s say you bring your bicycle for service.

You have your repair order. If you’re buying a bicycle, you have your warranty. You have your proof of purchase. All these documents will be stored in a bike ID cloud.

It’s kind of managing the whole dispatch of what goes where. So in simple terms, yeah. But it’s a melody of the future. I think we’re talking about the timeline for developing this whole full integration rollout.

We’re talking six months, I’d say, in production. Yeah. But we will be doing some more R&D efforts, different developments. We were very hopeful for the Fund 15 from Catalyst, but you know the drama that happened.

You know, it is what it is. What it would allow us is to hire more dedicated developers. You know, if you were a real world business and if you were commercially driven, first of all, your focus is to make money. Okay.

And, you know, for us to make money, we have to adhere to whatever the customer requirements are. I’m not saying blockchain is an afterthought. It’s quite the opposite. But again, it needs to have commercial kind of sense to us.

So it’d be really interesting to see how much of transactions would actually come on chain. So some of those activities would hit mainnet as a transaction, like over a year. It’d be interesting to see how much of an activity a bike would have on chain, on mainnet. That’s, I think, an interesting stat to try and work out.

Well, I can tell you right now. So for the first year, we’ve calculated that approximately 100 bicycles will be packaged together. And this is because of how it works in the supply chain, more or less, that’s why 100 bicycles is a nice kind of a middle ground. So we would be, for bicycle registration, we would be packaging them 100 bicycles for each transaction on the mainnet.

And for events, 1000 events per transaction on mainnet. Gotcha, okay. So just think about it this way, because this may not sound a lot, but when you think about it, that we are actually trailblazers in this whole kind of setup, and if this works and it will work, this whole DPP approach that we are having, we are giving a clear cut example to every single other industry. You know, bicycles are easy because bicycles are in a big problem at the moment.

They need something like bike ID, they need digital product passport, because the whole industry is in a disarray and they need recurring revenues. And without a single ID for the bicycle, there’s no talking about recurring revenues, because you cannot say, okay, this is the bike’s bicycle, this is the other bicycle, and so on. So if we think about it this way, we are showing that it actually makes sense for entire industries to anchor themselves on chain. And we wish that it was Cardano, because Cardano was actually built for this type of stuff.

Yeah, okay, that’s a really good way to paint it. Biking industry first, any other type of manufacturing that needs supply chain tracking, it can easily be applied to and using the same technology that you guys are building with the NFC RFID tags, totally embedded together, totally makes sense. Okay, well, six months time, I’d love to get you back on to see how far and what you guys are up to. Hopefully you have launched in that amount of time before the next Cardano summits, that would be absolutely amazing to see.

And I think I’ve got some really cool merch from the Cardano Foundation that has, I’ve got like a hoodie that has an NFC chip in there and I can actually scan that and see it all on chain as well. So, you know, it all ties in and it’s a very similar technology that’s all out there. So it’s really cool to see. I’m super glad that you mentioned this because, you know, when you’re talking clothing, that’s a massive industry and the amount of junk that’s going through.

I mean, if we want clothing to be sustainable, if we want clothing to use sustainable materials, not like wear once, you know, wash it, throw it away. Fast fashion is the worst thing that could happen to this planet. And same story, fast, if we’re talking about fast industries, you know, use it and forget it. I think we have a lot to learn, don’t you think?

Oh yeah, we definitely do, yeah. And if we want to do it at scale, we have ready-made solutions. I mean, that’s what DPP is for. And that’s why I am a huge believer in blockchain technology.

And that’s why I’m a huge believer in Cardano is because these technologies were built for that type of situation when we want to register real world assets. And if we want to, let’s say, okay, let’s imagine a perfect world, okay? And expensive, well, not expensive, let’s say middle ground e-bike, so you’re talking four or 5,000 euros, four or $5,000 a piece. You can apply leasing to it, you know, to make them affordable, okay?

You can apply insurance, you can sell service plan, and you can spread it over time, spread the payments over time, okay? Now, what the manufacturer knows at that point is that in three years’ time, you’re going to be in need of another bicycle. And what’s going to happen with this bike that they know about, that’s a second life because that bicycle comes back in for its second life. Again, it can be sold, a kind of a monthly payment situation, you know, you can lease it, you can finance it.

But again, it’s a circular economy, and that’s what we all want here. Yeah, we’ve got the history, it’s all recorded. We understand what we’re working with here so we can actually reuse it and whatnot. Speaking of history, speaking of history, I mean, you drive a car probably, yeah?

Yeah, I’ve got a car, yeah. So if you wanted to buy a car that had no service history, that there was no evidence that this is a legit source kind of situation, would you be inclined to buy it? No, not at all. I don’t think so.

Unless it was a Volkswagen Passat, I wouldn’t buy it. Fair enough, fair enough. But yeah, if you have that history, it’s highly valuable. You know what the car’s been through, you know what the bike’s been through, you know what needs repairing, what type of maintenance is required, you know if it’s fallen into a river and has been fished out and everything else around it.

So yeah, there’s a lot of value in that history and having it stored on chain is very, very valuable. And the same applies to every single other industry, every product that we’re using, there’s a little bit more complex and complicated than a hammer, proverbial hammer. I’d say there is a space for it. All right, brilliant.

Okay, Bike ID, it’s just the beginning. Hopefully we do see some really big things out of this type of technology and we go from bikes to other industries as well. But Bartek, thank you so much for sharing what you guys are doing and I’m looking forward to seeing the future of what you guys bring. Pete, thank you so much.

Great talking to you. Hopefully we’ll talk again in six months’ time. Awesome. Thank you.

Cheers. Bye-bye for now.