Machine Economy — a decentralized future that is enabled by autonomous machine-to-Machine transactions!

“Internet of Things is when your toaster mines Bitcoins to pay off its gambling debts to the fridge”

This quote describes very well how the future could look like and what’s the nature of the machine economy: everything will be smart, autonomous and connected, economically independent and most likely managed by a new technical backbone — and not by old mainframes anymore.

Between 2020 and 2025 our world will be populated by a new species of 50 billion connected devices, 100 Million Robots and 20 million Electric vehicles. This is also confirmed by the world economic forum, where they assume that 30% of Accounting, Procurement and Settlement will be done by blockchain and AI. 10% of GDP will be based on blockchain technologies by 2025 and society will be surrounded by a new species of autonomous machines, self driving cars, decision-making AIs and CRISPR DNA editing robots …
Machines are the customer of the future …

That’s how we came to the hypothesis that machines will become the customers of the future. Using APIs, distributed ledger technologies and AI there will be a shift from user centred design to a more machine centric ux: Here APIs will represent the communication channel. AIs will manage the rating KPIs for goods, availability and price and DLT will reduce the latency between transaction and settlement, especially in supply chains by cutting out the time-consuming and cost-intensive middleman.

We assume that machines will sooner or later have integrated wallets. First attempts in this direction have already been made. With Ethereum one can deploy wallets with smart contracts, Micro Raiden supports M2M microtransactions, and IOTA pursues a similar goal with the Tangle. New revenue streams are generated on the basis of micro-transactions at API level, not only for vendors of software solutions but also for hardware providers. Everything can be tokenized: A new token economy is emerging in the IoT space, where frictions of services can be monetized:

• Gateway requests
• GPS requests
• Storage
• Proof of Location
• Proof of Identity
• Proof of Existence

From now on, People and machines can shape and grow entire new economies or networks with their own goods and services (e.g. computation power, energy, storage, bandwidth) and being paid at the same time: P2P or M2M.
innogy plans to become a key player in this new game …

Challenges

However, this also means individuals must take more responsibility: The price for freedom and independence is to allocate time to gain knowledge. One has to understand (high-level) the principles of the underlying technology or token design. A person has to understand what risks (such as the loss of the private key) exist, how to minimise them and how to take advantage of this new responsibility. The decrease of technological and financial illiteracy is more important than ever before. The government, on the other hand, has to develop a new legal framework (taxation, ICOs, foundations) for token based business models to protect people, startups and corporates and to foster innovation.

Let’s meet the needs of machines … !

To make this happen, we focus on several startup investments: We want to shape the machine economy by building a portfolio of companies that literally meet the needs of machines. That’s why we apply the Maslow pyramid. This helps us to answer the question: What are the most important building blocks to shape and grow a decentralized economy where not only humans but also devices can talk to each other and do business with each other. For Humans the base of the pyramid consists of physiological needs such as air, water and food. For machines we can apply a very similar hierarchy: It starts with the most basic of needs.

Energy* …

Computing power and network connectivity.

*In 2017, we focused on business model innovation and created several use cases within verticals such as mobility, energy and supply chain. For example: Energy and Electric vehicles. This was very simple. We just put a charging pole and a car on the public Ethereum blockchain and provided each of them with a Full Node. Thus, both assets got an unique identity which enabled them to transact with each other automatically … fully regulated without the need for trust (middleman), a bank or a roaming partner. More about Share & Charge

Safety and Security

The next level provides safety and security which in the case of a machine or an IOT Device includes a reliable infrastructure, oracles, a trusted environment for execution and decryption, predictive maintenance and even post quantum resistance.

Social Belonging

The next level — social belonging — means that we assign an identity to the machine to realize M2M collaboration. In this stage a machine can make its presence known to another device, communicate with it and complete transactions while maintaining the required level of security for itself.

Esteem

The next level — self esteem — can already be achieved by machines — It’s simply the ability to learn, optimize and make autonomous decisions thanks to machine learning. We can also sense a certain entrepreneurial attitude when a machine is searching for the best price, when a 3D printer for example is looking for the best rated raw materials, so here we need M2M payments, embedded wallets, KYM for machines (Know your machines) and tokens as programmable money.

Self Actualization

And finally we have self-actualization at the very top: That’s the DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization to manifest the desire of self-fulfilment.

Our Investment Strategie: Maslow for Machines.

Our portfolio includes 7 investments at the moment: In 2017, we started with the base layer: Energy and our own Corporate Spin-Off Conjoule, a P2P Energy Trading startup based on blockchain and Motionwerk which offers a decentralized charging network for electric vehicles. In 2018, we are focusing on infrastructure, Oracles, Identity and Tokens as new investment vehicle.

Database — Social Belonging

BigchainDB: This was one of our first investments: With high throughput, sub-second latency and powerful functionality to automate business processes, BigchainDB looks, acts and feels like a database with added blockchain characteristics.

Oracles — Safety and Security

ScanTrust: We also invested in Scantrust which deals with product authentication and very interestingly the “imperfection of things” as unique identifier.

Cryptowerk: Another company we invested in, is Cryptowerk: Their line of business is to simplify the development of blockchain enabled applications for enterprise companies. Their technology enables high transaction throughput by bundling individual transactions cryptographically, then anchoring the bundle with only one single transaction into a public blockchain e.g. Bitcoin or Ethereum. In result, it reduces the cost per individual transaction by bundling them. Bundled transactions can be disaggregated on request and verified individually if required.

Esteem — Token

XTECH provides not only a M2M payment module but also a high velocity trading engine with up to 1 million transactions per second.

Neufund: Our most recent investment was Neufund, a new community owned cryptofund here based in Berlin.
Opportunity spaces

Here is an overview of what we are currently taking a deeper look into. Oracles, Identity, database/AI, devTools and new forms of investment in the Crypo-Token-Economy. We are happy to start a conversation with startups, co-investors and strategic partners. The range for our Ticket Size is normally between 250k — pre-seed, 500k seed and 1 million (series A). We want to be a strategic investor for every company from day one. Our offer as an investor is the network of industry partners, access to our own core business where relevant and the flexibility for new investment vehicles like ICOs.

Feel free to contact us!

[email protected]