Enter the LayerDrone Network

LayerDrone’s decentralized protocol tackles these issues by creating an affordable, standardized, and scalable solution for high-resolution data capture.

The LayerDrone Network is a crowdsourcing protocol to incentivize drone operators in supported geographies to collect drone survey data. These drone operators (Pilots) can use off-the-shelf drone hardware, provided they comply with local drone regulations. At launch, the LayerDrone Protocol includes rules for assigning Pilots to specific areas to collect data, smart contracts to issue receipts (proof they submitted data), and a method for rewarding their work.

LayerDrone is addressing several critical challenges that have prevented the earth imagery industry from leveraging drones for better image capture for existing use cases and enabling more exciting use cases.

• Technical Standardization: One issue that has prevented wide scale sharing of imagery has been a multitude of image angles, heights, and resolutions captured in the many one-off contracted projects that collect data today. LayerDrone has divided the world into a grid of uniform hexagons that can be captured in the same way.

• Leveraging Micro-drones: The LayerDrone Network uniquely taps sub-250g drones. This is a new generation of drone technology, largely inspired by western governments creating aviation regulations which determined drones weighing under 250g introduce less risk into the airspace, therefore enabling more operating freedoms. They are light, affordable, and quiet, posing few of the nuisances and concerns that the earlier generations of consumer drones had.

• Regulatory Compliance: Drones are heavily regulated, and for good reason given competition with other airspace users like manned aircraft. The LayerDrone Network has been built by drone experts, and its ruleset includes respect for the many, varied, and dynamic restrictions that structure commercial drone use today.

• Incentives for Sharing: Critical to the story of why a drone-enabled image layer has not emerged prior to LayerDrone is a simple mismatch of business models. Many existing drone operators fly on a contract basis for specific client needs: these bespoke agreements have high transaction costs and bilateral data delivery. The current platform business models for high resolution imagery, such as Nearmap and EagleView, are largely focused on aviation image capture, and bear a high capital cost. The LayerDrone Network standardizes data capture, validation, and delivery; it also has established a decentralized business model that lets it scale quickly, affordably, and fairly.