Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
DRONE ON explores how drones are reshaping the world. Hosted by Bryce Bladon, the podcast documents the tech, economics and people piloting the world's largest standardized drone imagery network.
Bryce Bladon: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Drone On, the only podcast in the air and on the airwaves. I am your host, Bryce Bladen, and today's topic is How LayerDrone became the world's largest drone imagery network. I'm joined today by Alec Wilson, COO of Spexi. Alec, pleasure to have you on.
Alec Wilson: Thanks for having me. Bryce.
Alec Wilson: Helicopter Pilot to Drone COO
---
Bryce Bladon: Well let's start with your personal story of how you got into drones.
Alec Wilson: Well, when I was flying helicopters for a living, um, in the late sort of 20 18, 20 19, 2020s, they were really exploding. Um, the tech was, was just coming into itself. There was no regulation yet for them, but everyone was talking about drones.
They had them, they were using them on the weekends. They were starting to come into more commercial settings and I started seeing them show up more and more in our job sites, helicopter job sites. When I was on the ground talking to the guys, you know, whether it be logging forestry or mining exploration or like inspection of lines or infrastructure, they would be around.
And I [00:01:00] was always really curious about the technology. Um, and then I actually had to, uh, I was flying tourists around in the low Vancouver airspace and I had to dodge one. There was one hovering like at 1500 feet above downtown Vancouver and kind of saw in my eye and I literally had to like evasive maneuver to avoid it. And I, you know, three people on board with me. And so I, I was really just like, okay, these things are everywhere. Like what is going on?
And in and around that time, around 2017, this was, I met someone named Kate Klassen and she was working on drone regulation. She, like me, was a commercial pilot, but she was on fixed wing side and she was speaking with Transport Canada and the regulators about, you know, how this industry should be regulated. You know, what, what should we be doing to integrate drones safely into the manned air space? And, and her and I hit it off and she was involved with some of the owners of the helicopter company I was working with.
Alec co-founds Coastal Drone
---
Alec Wilson: And so we all decided to get this company called Coastal Drone going, which would be this training regulatory advisory entity to help transport Canada, the [00:02:00] government, but then also all these drone pilots in Canada to figure out how best to get drones into the, um, integrated into the manned air space. And so that was my foray.
Coastal drones started doing really well. It got a lot of attention after these new regulations came out because we were the, it was really the only online company in Canada to enable pilots to get up to the standards for training. And so, you know, before we knew it, there was 10,000 people that had gone through our products and we did some really cool deals with Best Buy and, and other retailers like London Drugs to make, uh, all of our products available to their customers. And from there, I was just really fascinated by the business. I was running the business, I was still flying helicopters at the same time.
And it was during that time around late 2019, 2020s, where I met Bill, who's the CEO of Spexi and in the early stages of building a software platform to put drones to work with software. And I was always interested in figuring out how to leverage the community that was built by our company, um, to put them to work.
And, you know, software is the perfect way to standardize that kind of thing. So Bill and I quickly realized that we should be [00:03:00] working together and the rest is history.
Bryce Bladon: Fantastic. So one thing I do find very interesting about that is your origin story for drones is kind of like me saying I almost hit a deer on the highway and ever since then it's been deers.
Alec Wilson: I mean, I, I don't think it was because I almost, you know, I had to dodge a drone that I got interested in them. I was still interested in them. But I think for me, that highlighted this need of integration and, and, and integration from the perspective of people that are in the air, right, that have to deal with the consequences of.
Being in the air and, and if something goes wrong up there, you know, the consequences arise. So I think it made me more motivated to be on the regulatory side and, and help the government understand what some of the nuances and realities of drones in the airspace are. But it, I, you know, being on the regulator side as you're starting to bring this technology in, is.
Like drones or aircraft, aircraft are regulated in most countries by the aviation authority. And so you really can't go much faster than how those regulations come into effect. And so I wanted to also be part of making sure that hopefully that those regulations were fit for purpose and they weren't gonna stifle [00:04:00] innovation too much, but also enable the safe integration of path.
Bryce Bladon: Speaking of, uh, trying to do something new while, uh, doing it according to regulations, best practices, and the people involved. Perhaps we should get into why the COO of Spexi is talking to me about LayerDrone. Let's explain what LayerDrone is. Let's start there.
LayerDrone's founding vision
---
Bryce Bladon: What is LayerDrone? What was the founding Vision?
Alec Wilson: LayerDrone, um, is a crypto economic protocol and network that enables standardized ultra high resolution drone imagery to be made available to anyone that wants to interact with them.
It's a set of rules and it's a set of processes and, and, um. And technology that enable many, many, many people, drone pilots in particular on the supply side to interact with it. It provides the structure for pilots to contribute high quality, standardized imagery to it. It houses that, that data, uh, in a governance network that is controlled in part by the people that own it and then makes it available to customers. And so [00:05:00] crypto economic piece is that it's built on the blockchain. So the rules around how that data is moved in and moved out and how people are compensated for that and, and how LayerDrone wants to move around in the world is in part governed by the, the people that own tokens that are associated to that network protocol, which there is no token yet, but there will be one in the future... We, we understand. And, um, it is the largest of its kind in the world. So it was spun out of Spexi's Tech stack. Um, because, you know, we realized that there needed to be this open source, common good network that enabled all of this activity. And Spexi is its founding core contributor.
So we create technology that interfaces with the protocol. Uh, we make it easier and possible for pilots to contribute data to the network using our mobile application, which is powered by. LayerDrone, and we make it easier for customers or data buyers or the demand side to pull data out of the LayerDrone network, which is mostly just raw, the layer LayerDrone stores the data as raw imagery coming in from the [00:06:00] drones and it, it standardizes that process and indexes it. And then Spexi can come in. Pay LayerDrone for access to that data and then make that data into more valuable data products for its customers.
And, and that's the same for any company that might wanna do that. So LayerDrone will publish the standards for which anyone to go build applications, to pull data from it, and also to build applications to contribute data to it. And so. Spexi is the first of these to do that with LayerDrone. But I think, you know, it would be great to see more.
Bryce Bladon: Gotcha.
So up to this point, Spexi has been handling both the demand side of the network IE customers who pay for the data and the supply side.
Spexi's relationship with LayerDrone
---
Bryce Bladon: What's the nature of that relationship since LayerDrone has been created?
Alec Wilson: Well, the, the drone pilots use Spexi's applications to contribute data to LayerDrone, but they ultimately are LayerDrone community pilots.
They, they belong to the LayerDrone Network. Um, and Spexi is a, is a software provider to that network. So they understand the Spexi brand and, and they were involved in that before. But really they are gonna be and will [00:07:00] want to be where all the. The ownership is where the incentives are, where, where the, uh, origin of digital ownership lies, which is LayerDrone, and the LayerDrone Foundation, and the LayerDrone protocols.
So they're very much tied into the future of LayerDrone. They'll have a say in what, what it does and, and how it, how it moves itself into the future. It moves into new countries and it will be, uh, just, and is already an incredibly vibrant community and place for people that are like-minded, that have drones, that love drones that.
Like to fly their drones and contribute to a ever updating ultra high resolution base map of the world, which the demand side the customers can interact with at crazy scales. And so the customers that get to see this data are just amazed by its quality, by its freshness, by its. Detail, nothing like this has ever been produced on earth at this kind of scale.
LayerDrone standardizes and coordinates thousands of drones
---
Alec Wilson: Drones have been around for a long time. They've been producing data and imagery and videos for years and years and years, but there's not ever been an effort to coordinate and standardize that data at scale. And that's really what LayerDrone does. At its [00:08:00] core, it's standardizes and coordinates many different drones and and their pilots to contribute to an ultra high resolution standardized base map of the earth.
And so customers get to imagine what they might be able to build with access to that kind of data. And you know, we're seeing some really interesting use cases already in these super early days, like this launch of physical AI or spatial AI or large geospatial models or large world models, or, you know, there's a few names for them now, but what is the next generation of spatially in the real world thinking AI like the, I think the, the best way I've heard it described is LLMs are book smart and they are really good at semantically telling you things and what's going on, and, and they can, they can read images and tell you about them, but try to get an LLM to go direct a robot in the physical world and have it understand how to navigate and it, it'll fall on its face. And that's where this next generation of spatial AI comes into play. And in order for that kind of AI to [00:09:00] work it needs to be trained on the best imagery and data could get its hands on and LayerDrone has that data, the best, highest resolution, aerial perspective data over urban environments. And so we're seeing a ton of interest. On the customer side of these crazy well-funded tech companies wanting to interact with it.
And so that's like such an exciting thing to see. But all the way down to the mundane use cases like city planning and, you know, um, carbon credit verification and insurance companies and construction companies is just wanting a better understanding of how the world is updated in, in a higher temporal scale than what they can get from satellites or by resolution, the one they can get from satellites.
So it really does. Across a big spectrum on the demand side, which is really exciting. And I think the use cases are nearly endless.
Bryce Bladon: Very, very interesting. So to just, uh, position LayerDrone in, in listeners' minds at the start of 2025, uh, Spexi had been functioning and functioning quite well as a successful business up to that point.
Why take the risk of creating LayerDrone?
---
Bryce Bladon: And then, I believe it was [00:10:00] Q2 2025 that the LayerDrone Foundation was, uh, effectively announced and spun out of Spexi. And at the time of this recording I don't believe the token generation event or anything related to that has occurred, but I would be really curious from your perspective about what, but the simply what keeps you up at night with like this big swing you are effectively taking, LayerDrone is all very new sounding, whereas Spexi has almost a decade of success, uh, where you didn't have to do this.
Um. And, you know, maybe, maybe there's a rationale that you're gonna succeed so much more through LayerDrone, or maybe there's something else here I'm not seeing, but I'd be really curious as somebody who's been in this space for this long, like what was the catalyst and, and what's the concern and, and what excites you about it?
Alec Wilson: Hmm. Well, I think we felt. That LayerDrone as a public good, that was an open source network and protocol that was owned by the people that contribute to it. Um, and governed by the people that contributed over time was the most exciting, [00:11:00] uh, valuable, interesting, uh, forward thinking, you know, way for this to exist.
And the biggest we could think it could get, like think about the biggest thing. That you could do in this space. And like, I think LayerDrone represents that that's a crypto economic protocol that incentivizes mass data capture at scale and makes that available to customers that wanna buy it. It's a Web3 view of the world and we're, you know, big optimists here.
And, and we think that web three's a really interesting way that it, the internet is going to be organized and, and composed of in the future. And, you know, the world is still quite a bit behind, uh, in its thinking about Web3, we've, we've been believers since, you know, 2022 roughly, which in crypto's a long time, but really it's not, uh, at all.
So I, I mean, I think, you know, it was, it was just a clear, it was just a clear view for us. I mean, we, we, we had saw in late 2021, we ran into a network called Helium, which was. Doing this for wireless networks and incentivizing people to set up wireless stations in their [00:12:00] HAL homes and provide connectivity and then reward them in crypto, um, for doing that.
And it was just such a fascinating use case for how this could, could work into the future. And I think we quickly drew the parallel that you could do this with an aerial imaging network. It would be hard, and I know almost unfathomable in some ways. But you know, I think we, we saw the vision and, and, and now it's manifested in LayerDrone and it's got its own path and its own governance and structure and it's so cool to see.
So, I mean, I think what keeps me up at night is just the amount of ways this can all go, the possibilities and direction that LayerDrone, I think has in front of it. And Spexi as a core contributor to be able to work with it together is. It is almost endless. And I think sometimes that can be overwhelming and you know, it's a lot, it's a, it's a big aviation movement.
There's a lot of aircraft moving on that network at any given time. And I think, you know, making sure that's done correctly and pilots are being responsible and safe is something I think about a lot. And one of the great things about this network too is that it gives pilots a lot of agency, it's at their discretion to interact or contribute to the network, they're in command at all times. Uh, the Spexi [00:13:00] mobile app is a autonomous system. It controls their drone autonomously, but they are always in control of the drone can and can take back manual control at any time. And so making sure that pilots, you know, have a good understanding of, of all of that, but also the responsibility that they have as people that are operating aircraft in the airspace.
And back to the way we started this call of my experience, dodging them in, in the low Vancouver air space. Kind of full circle here, right? So. You know, I've made sure that the design of this network has, is, is with all of that at the best practices and safety and, um, you know, drone heights are not above even 300 feet.
They're not even 400 feet, which is the, the guideline or the, the rule. But they're at 260 feet. The Spexigons are 25 acre Spexigons, which promote visual line of sight flight. They're the perfect size that you can actually maintain visual line of sight flight at all times while the drone is imaging its hex. And the mobile app has tons of safety features and guidelines built into it to make pilots lives easier. The lots of work, lots more work to be done.
But you know, it's just a big kind of [00:14:00] movement that way. And, and I think it's really exciting, but it's also sometimes, uh, overwhelming.
Bryce Bladon: I mean, it's a lot, uh, it's a lot for all the right reasons in my mind. When I, uh, whenever I need to explain the why of blockchain or crypto or Web3, what it usually comes down to is the technology is good at letting two people transfer value with no one in the middle.
And what I find so interesting about what Spexi is doing with LayerDrone is from a certain perspective, you are removing yourselves as the middlemen. Like you are basically giving pilots a lot more agency than they would've had a year ago. If this all goes to plan and a lot more frankly control if your, uh, plans for governance or rather if LayerDrones plans for governance and, and things of that effect all come together, but also for all of Spexi's goals, that is possibly an enablement layer when I think about the actual utility of things like blockchain. What I was just saying before, international payments, payments in general, uh, trying to equate value to work that maybe doesn't, uh, equate to [00:15:00] a one-to-one dollar figure. These are all exceptionally good use cases of the technology, and they all seem to be reasons, uh, behind what specie and LayerDrone are trying to accomplish.
With all that said, if I misspoke on any of that, please feel free to correct me. But I'd otherwise love if you could let our listeners know how they can, uh, follow along with everything you're doing.
Alec Wilson: Yeah, well, um, uh, no, I don't think you misspoke at all. I think you know the, the crypto economics and networks and you know, two-sided marketplaces are a great fit. Done correctly, I think it is one of the most powerful forces of network effects that we will see in our, in our generation, hard to do correctly. So making sure that the economics make sense. The expansion isn't too fast. There's enough utility and revenue in the, in the network to justify all of the expansion. Those are things that I think, you know, we've thought about for a long time. And I know that LayerDrone is continuing to advance itself on, but ultimately, you know, the, the principles you have there are correct.
So how do you follow Spexi? Spexi Geospatial... um, at Spexi Geospatial on Twitter, X and LinkedIn [00:16:00] is Spexi and, you know, Facebook, Instagram, whatever.
And LayerDrone is LayerDrone LayerDrone.org. Um, Spexi.com. You know, you'll, you'll see, I think it's fairly well laid out now how the, these two entities are, are related, but also just separate and distinct and, and are on their own paths. And, uh, so it's just a really exciting time.
Bryce Bladon: Fantastic. Alright, Alec, if you have time, I would like to take you to one of my favorite segments of the show, uh, innovation or idiotic.
Innovation or Idiotic?
---
Bryce Bladon: I am going to tell you two lies and a truth about, uh, recent innovative drone applications, and you need to tell me which one is real. First up, DJI developed an empathy drone in 2020 that uses facial recognition to detect human emotions automatically adjusting its flight pattern when it detects fear and higher wind sensing, excitement, or joy.
Number two, Tesla filed patents for underground drone tunnels in 2019. Essentially, subway [00:17:00] systems for autonomous delivery drones that would travel through the existing infrastructure to avoid airspace regulations. Third one: Wing has a specialized team of drone psychologists who study the behavioral patterns of birds to design flight paths that don't interact with them.
Alec Wilson: I, I need to tell you which one is a lie?.
Bryce Bladon: You need to tell me which one of those exists.
Alec Wilson: Okay. Um, I don't think Tesla did that because I know Elon Musk hates flying stuff. And he believes that. I mean, but it does make sense because he thinks it's, they should all be underground.
Bryce Bladon: Rockets are its tunnels.
Alec Wilson: I mean, he doesn't hate flying stuff. He doesn't hate flying stuff. He doesn't, he doesn't like drones. I, I know that he just, he can't imagine a future where drones are buzzing over everyone's hands loudly. Which I agree with, which is why the drones are very small and LayerDrones network, by the way. Um, the DGI, emotional one. That is possible.
That is possible. And then the last one, bird patterns. It's also, it's all possible. That's tough. Uh, okay. I think the bird one is true.
Bryce Bladon: You nailed it. Wing was, uh, Google's attempt at, uh, drone delivery in 2019. I kept [00:18:00] that detail out of it 'cause I felt like that really added it, some legitimacy that would've given away the game.
But yeah. Good read. Uh, I actually had another one for you, uh, tied to this. I recently learned that, uh, Iceland was doing drone delivery, um, to rural areas, but they were getting attacked by, uh. The turns that was nesting out there. And uh, so now if you get a delivery drone in Iceland, it has a nice little scarecrow on top of it to scare away the birds, which I think is just neat.
Alec Wilson: Yeah, the bird birds are, I mean, I've been attacked in helicopters by birds, like I've been swooped by eagles, like coming at the helicopter many times. Happens all the time when you're flying in the mountains or in the forest and it's like she should death wish like you, you will, you will die. Like we will not die the, I ran a helicopter, but if you, if a big eagle hits a helicopter.
Not good. So, um, you don't want it to happen, but birds are, birds are kind of nuts.
Bryce Bladon: That is nuts.
I've only been attacked by a bird once and it was when I was at an age where the bird was bigger than me, so it made a lot of sense and I was like, Hey, I see how they came from dinosaurs, but, um, just throwing [00:19:00] themselves at aircraft.
That's awesome. Cool. Great. Good job, birds. Alright. Thank you Alex, so much for joining us today. Thanks for listening to Drone On. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Get a new episode every week and leave us a five star review on your podcast app of choice. You can learn more about our sponsors at Spexi.com
That's SPEXI.com and LayerDrone.org. Find out how you can contribute to the world's largest drone imagery network too. Thanks again for listening.