Welcome to Kadena Eco’s Project Spotlight Series, where we highlight the groundbreaking work of organizations currently building on Kadena!

Today, we’re shining the spotlight on Crankk, A community-founded project that has developed distributed wireless networks that provide coverage for IoT devices such as smart meters and GPS trackers. Using Kadena’s low gas fees and its secure and high throughput Proof-of-Work network, Crankk plans to build a community network for LoRaWan coverage with better transparency and with checks running through Pact.

We recently spoke with Peter Varga, Crankk.io’s founder, about his recently created Proof-of-Coverage network that he plans to build along with his open source hardware and software.

Crankk is a resource-sharing IoT network. Miners operate IoT gateways earning Crankk tokens for providing LoRaWAN coverage. The network will have external customers paying a fee for that coverage. Network earnings get distributed among gateway operators.

I come from a large scale enterprise business applications background as well as a business and consumer-facing IoT background. First built a Paypal merchant services type of application on Ethereum but high gas fees and other distractions turned me away quickly. My first Kadena experience was buying a home miner and operating it roughly 2 years ago. Then checked out Kadena’s background and smart contract language and made the decision to continue developing on Kadena.

In my mind, it’s a long game. The decision to build on Kadena was probably one of the crucial ones. This sets us up with a strong technical basis and a strong community to build on. It also implies a lot more open architecture. Everything needs to be independently verifiable to earn and maintain the trust of the community as well as customers. We have a lot of ideas on how to build a distributed resource-sharing network. Working on the sales side and making sure that the network starts earning revenue from the very beginning is important. So is staying open and welcoming new technologies onto the network when it makes sense.

For me, it was the fact that Kadena has a proper database behind it. It provided enough motivation to learn Pact as well. Seeing the community develop and mature around it with multiple diverse projects getting started is also a great benefit in a very practical sense. Applying for a Kadena Grant meant to hope to obtain the support of Kadena itself and earn the right to be a respectable member project of the ecosystem.

In the next 6 months, we’d like to gradually expand our device offerings and work with manufacturers to offload some of the work and concentrate on our core competency.

In 3 years, we’d like us to have grown into an IoT network with global coverage and an increasing set of exciting features

Follow your heart and build something you’re passionate about. Ask yourself about the value blockchain technology brings to the table. Try to make it as distributed and non-custodial as possible to maximize the value brought on by the blockchain.

Many thanks to Crankk for sharing their vision for building an exciting piece of infrastructure on Kadena! Be sure to follow them on their socials:

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more Project Spotlights, as we’ll continue to profile innovative organizations that are currently building on Kadena with support from Kadena Eco, our innovation network that supports startups at every phase of their development journey.