A group of scientists have computationally designed a hybrid material which can absorb greenhouse gas methane, converting it to clean Hydrogen and also simulated a process of capturing carbon dioxide in-situ and converting it to high purity hydrogen from non-fuel grade bioethanol. They have also designed a facility that can test such materials and help further carbon capture research at the institute.
Given the global warming potential of greenhouse gases, scientists are trying to explore innovative methods of absorbing these gases and converting them to useful substances. New materials that can play dual role of absorption as well as conversion is the new challenge area for scientist in carbon capture innovation.
Responding to the challenge, in a series of researches on carbon capture and utilization scientists from Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), Hyderabad have not only computationally designed a hybrid material that can capture methane and also act as catalyst to convert it to high purity hydrogen, but also simulated and designed a process for in situ capture of carbon dioxide and its conversion to high purity hydrogen from non-fuel grade bioethanol through a mechanism called the optimized intensified chemical looping reforming. The later research has been published in the Elsevier journal Chemical Engineering and Processing.
They researchers have also fabricated a facility that can further carbon capture and conversion research at the institute. The facility, a dual operational fixed cum fluidized bed reactor system (FBR) can carry out sorption enhanced steam methane reforming (SESMR) for high purity H2production based on the modelling and preliminary experimental studies.
Snapshot of FBR system installed at CSIR-IICT
The FBR facility has been successfully commissioned recently in Jan 2022 at CSIR-IICT, Hyderabad, under a Mission Innovation Project supported by Department of Science and Technology to IICT Hyderabad. It is unique and available for the first time in the country to test the performance of dual functional materials for SESMR in fluidized bed reactor system. SESMR offers specific advantages of in-situ CO2 removal through sorbents and thereby overcomes the equilibrium limitations of steam reforming and leads to high purity H2 production.
Potential dual functional materials identified from theoretical predictions are now being synthesized and simultaneously FBR operating conditions are being optimized for existing sorbent/catalyst materials for meeting increasing challenges of carbon capture and utilization and associated research.
The interest in cryptocurrencies has brought a lot of focus on blockchain technologies. However, one major area where blockchain can be used effectively along with geospatial technologies is the Internet of Things. As technologies and data collection and processing get more complicated, the questions are what is the data, how is it validated, how is the proof of location established, how are things and humans protected from illegal access and processes?
XYO Network is the world’s first blockchain geospatial network backed with cryptography that anonymously collects and validates data with a geographic component. XYO calls itself the Reality Oracle, a technology protocol designed to improve the validity, certainty, and value of data. It is seeking to build a data marketplace that gives users a gold-standard for any apps, websites, and blockchain technologies that rely on trusted data.
We caught up with Markus Levin, the Co-Founder XYO Network, for an interview. Levin also serves as Head of Operations for XYO’s parent company XY Labs. XY Labs provides a connection between the real and digital worlds through blockchain, IoT, and data-focused products, which can be leveraged to make human lives easier. For example, the COIN App empowers its over 3 million users to be rewarded for validating geospatial location and other data.
Levin has more than 15 years’ experience in building, managing, and growing companies in hyper-growth industries around the globe. He mined his first bitcoin in 2013 and has been captivated by blockchain technologies ever since.
In this interview Levin talks about his vision for XYO, the link between hyper location and blockchain, and how it is all addressing real-world challenges.
Tell us about some notable XYO use cases within industries such as insurance, supply chain, banking, infrastructure, public safety, and more?
XYO’s decentralized network of devices anonymously collects and validates data associated with geography, temperature, humidity, and even speed, among other components. While the nature of geospatial data has been historically complex and cumbersome to leverage, XYO’s advancements in the area, along with industry collaborations, are allowing commercial enterprises to tap into and harness this information like never before.
Geospatial data is often used to develop consistent, up-to-date, and accurate representations of the physical and digital world, i.e., the metaverse and other virtual spaces.
Acting as a Reality Oracle, XYO harnesses the power of data to address real-world challenges in various scenarios — from directing disaster response to more accurately assessing underwriting risk, analyzing behavioral patterns, and even addressing supply chain issues.
Notable use cases include:
Addressing supply chain issues by identifying disruptions and bottlenecks in real-time
Providing insights to plan, design, build, and maintain infrastructure efficiently (i.e., analyzing traffic patterns).
Bolstering public safety by monitoring dangers such as weather incidents and pandemic outbreaks in real-time.
XYO utilizes proprietary data and all the data provided to the network is processed as real-time information, analyzed, archived, and then acted upon accordingly.
explore.xyo.network lets users view recent data on the XYO Network and run queries on the network.
What was your vision of XYO when you launched it and how it is evolving?
Our mission is to create software and devices that focus on location and geospatial data to build a global data network that connects the physical world to the digital world. With our community, we’re creating a system of location oracles that will improve current and future location data systems through data that can’t be changed.
XYO calls itself the world’s first Reality Oracle, which empowers people to participate in the global data economy through the validation of anonymous and secure geospatial data.
XYO has created a reliable Data Ocean, meaning it collects data from various sources and pools it together for verification and analysis. Just as rivers flow towards an ocean, “rivers” of data from the nodes in the XYO Network all run towards the larger XYO Data Ocean, providing an aggregated place for data. After the data is collected and aggregated, the cryptographic protocol can help validate and improve the trust for that collected data.
Data is the currency of the future. Ensuring people’s security and agency in the data economy is critical to the quality of life. XYO educates and empowers the people who will be most affected by the data revolution — those who create the data. We believe most people don’t fully understand the power and value of the data they generate every single day. XYO educates users about that power by encouraging them to harness it.
node.xyo.network lets users transform their device into a node in the XYO Network. Create Bound Witnesses, view block data, and explore the public XYO Archivist.
Tell us more about the XYO Token and how it works.
The XYO Token ($XYO) is an Ethereum-based ERC-20 utility token used to calculate smart contract agreements on XYO Network. With over four million nodes for the XYO Network, XYO Token is being rapidly adopted. An analysis of 500 users showed XYO-USD portfolio growth of over $14 million as of August 2021.
In January, $XYO was listed on Huboi, one of the leading and most secure digital asset exchanges in the world with over 10 million users.
The coin powers a decentralized network of devices that anonymously collects and validates geospatial data, and also prevents devices from spoofing their location. On the XYO World platform, XYO tokens can be traded for and staked against unique ERC-721 tokens representing real-world locations.
XYO recently announced the launch of its newest network version, XYO 2.0. How will it empower developers?
XYO 2.0 makes the data collected by our users easy for partners to access and utilize. By building functionality with JSON and accessibility through APIs, the data is secure and virtually tamperproof given XYO 2.0’s blockchain and cryptographic technology.
XYO provides SDKs ready for immediate implementation, so developers can plug right into XYO and produce cutting-edge solutions for their projects.
The technology protocol that we have designed is singular and can be implemented in any project, in any place, in many different coding languages. The data source doesn’t matter since XYO uses a unique cryptographic protocol to ensure data verification and trust.
XYO has really been on the move. Could you tell us a bit more about your recent activities?
February was an impressive month for XYO. We announced a strategic co-investment with Outliers Fund, a collective of joint research initiatives and venture funds with top blockchain ecosystems, and Analog, the first company that is a true Layer-0 protocol powered by blockchain technology—all of these developments, are to accelerate projects built around the XYO Network.
We’re also excited to announce our partnership with HERE Technologies, a location solutions company, last year. As leaders in location technology, the collaboration represents an opportunity to expand the availability of secure, verified geospatial data and to bridge real-world location data with blockchain-based smart contracts. With XYO’s ability to capture, index, and store location data and HERE Technologies’ powerful geospatial mapping capabilities, the partnership stands to unlock a treasure trove of advancements in location data and technology.
XYO has also developed and strengthened pivotal partnerships with key players in the web3 community, including Chainlink, Microsoft, Dispatch Labs, and Harmony. As we continue to focus on maximizing education surrounding our open source code protocol, we look to partner with more industry leaders in the future.
And, of course, a wide array of exchanges have recognized the value of the XYO Network and the XYO token in recent months. The accomplishment represented by these listings results from the forward-thinking nature of those exchanges and our diligent team.
Where is XYO headed next, and how has the company pivoted in the wake of innovations in technology, specifically data location?
As we look to the remainder of 2022 and beyond, XYO is excited about new projects and partnerships in the pipeline that will continue to drive blockchain technology forward. And as this technology continues to evolve, we’re aiming to have a say in how the global, cross-platform metaverse and other virtual spaces take shape—we aim to provide tested solutions to accelerate the growth we all know is ahead.
Here’s an example: $XYO is now more widely available, with more exchanges being added regularly. By combining the XYO Protocol 2.0 changes, COIN data producers and purchasers, and XYO Token Payment Channels, we are forging a revolutionary data marketplace that uses XYO tokens as the low-cost payment method for data exchanges without relying on the emergence of a cost-effective decentralized smart contract system.
In an exclusive interview with Geospatial World, Ashwinii Rawat, Co-founder & Director, Transerve, an Indian Location Intelligence company, talks about what makes his company unique in the Indian geospatial market, its vision for the year ahead, the technologies it employs, the sectors that benefit from Location Intelligence (LI) the most, and the impact of the new geospatial guidelines on location analytics.
Transerve’s USP
We identify ourselves as an LI platform provider. We have a product called Transerve Online Stack, which is a Software-as-a-Service-based (SaaS-based) LI platform that allows users to carry out analysis on spatial data, particularly on large volume data. And it has some pre-package analysis too, meant for business decision-makers so that analysis can be readily done on the platform without resorting to in-house spatial practice.
Generally, when it comes to location data, people have a team handling the GIS software, desktop or web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and the databases. We have made that process easy by providing the tools for those business analysts, so that they can take a much more informed decision. The key differentiator, between Transerve and other geospatial analytics companies, is that we are good at handling a large volume of data, particularly on Cloud; data that comes at a very high speed, and on a regular basis. One of the examples of such a dataset is, the human mobility data.
Vision for 2022
Things are going at a far quicker pace now, especially after the introduction of the new geospatial policy in February 2021. The policy has allowed companies like us to host a lot of data on web and disseminate it to our clients. The vision for Transerve is to go global this year, because we have access to datasets. We have had more and more clients in developed economies. So, the vision of Transerve is to have a larger footprint globally.
Technologies at play
We are focusing more on the better data processing. We do have plans for providing the raster-based analysis to our customer, particularly on higher resolution imagery. So, we are still waiting for remote sensing policy to get relaxed, to allow companies like us to host the data on web. And the main idea was to allow our customers to detect the changes over a period of time. This entire technology has been built from scratch by using things like Python and other Modern Stack, like MEAN Stack, which uses the geospatial capabilities of Big Data onto our platform. From a technical aspect, things have become flexible for our users to handle the large volume of data. As such, we are not using any third party application.
Sectoral application
Over the period of last one, one and a half years, especially after COVID-19, we have seen the adoption of location and geospatial technology at a much faster rate. And to name some of the sectors, I would like to keep Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) at present, followed by sectors like retail and real estate. These three sectors have seen adoption that does not require prior experience working with the geospatial datasets. And if I talk about the BFSI sector in particular, we have seen the new age technology companies like ADM Capital, and other FinTech companies eyeing more and more users on their platform. Not just in terms of allowing for easy payments, but also for low disbursements as well.
There are companies who want to do micro-zonal analysis to figure out where product requirement is coming from, where exactly do the good customers live.
Because of COVID-19, a lot of points of interest (POIs) have changed in India. In some of the cities we have seen that at least 13-15% of businesses have either shifted to a new location, or they have moved from a larger province to a smaller province, or some of them have shut down, or new business have come up. Private sector banks want to know what new businesses have come up in the last two years, where they can reach out and then provide financial services to those business owners. So, BFSI, retail, and real estate would be the largest adopters of location and geospatial technology among all sectors.
Impact of geospatial reforms on location analytics
The reforms will allow spatial location intelligence companies to host data. Earlier there were restrictions on collecting the high resolution data, as well as hosting it and selling it to the clients who were not Indian. But that has been done away with up to certain accuracy. Data can be hosted on Cloud, and can be accessed by not just Indian companies, but by foreign companies as well. Geospatial policy has made things easy for the companies eyeing to provide location intelligence services on our web platform. Despite the widespread adoption of Cloud in last decade, the geospatial industry in India was actually one of the last adopters because of the restrictions on sharing or restoring the data on Cloud.
Partners and future growth
We have identified almost 2,000 trusted data sources globally who provide data in different domains, be it consumer spending data, consumer behavior data, or human geographic data — all data on parameters like demographic, or socioeconomic parameters at high resolutions. There are companies who we have already signed up, not just in India, but in Europe, the UK, and Canada and the US, who are going to host their datasets on our platform.
Another interesting thing that we are going to provide pretty soon on our platform is merging first-party data — data that is owned by the customer — with our data. If I talk about a bank, with its own geospatial data, it can take the data Transerve provides on the platform and merge it with its own datasets to create customer personas.
Future sectors where I see growth happening is the e-commerce industry, particularly for last meter connectivity. The challenge, not just in India but globally, is that the precision, or accuracy, of the Point of Interest (POI) is not that great as of now. Everyone talks about the last mile connectivity, but only very few people are able to attempt this challenge of taking the delivery boys, or the logistics company to the doorstep of their consumer.
