DAV Network (DAV) ICO Review

Recently, Uber had decided to pull out of Southeast Asia and let their rival Grab to acquire both the ride-sharing and food delivery businesses. Another interesting news is that Baidu has just received the permit to test their autonomous cars in Beijing. Sharing economy and autonomous car are very hot industries now, so does blockchain! And that is what the Decentralized Autonomous Vehicles (DAV) Network is about.

What is DAV Network?

As the name indicates, DAV is trying to create an open-source and decentralized platform that will connect the buyers and sellers of autonomous vehicles services, totally peer-to-peer. Let’s say in 30 years, I have an autonomous car in my garage and I would like it to earn some money for me while I am not using it. I can connect my car to the DAV network and my car will automatically be connected to someone who needs a ride or a package-delivery. In return, I will be paid in DAV tokens. DAV actually makes the whole process a lot smoother by involving other parties that will provide services like charging, insurance, cleaning etc. Therefore, I can actually let my car “working” for me the whole day without me worrying a single thing! If you imagine this in a larger scale, with fleets of autonomous cars, trucks, drones, ships and robots all connected through DAV Network, how efficient and wonderful the future transportation will be!

How does it work?

The whitepaper of DAV is really thorough and the whole system is described in details. There will be 5 major components to built up the platform:
1. Identity: Each entity in the DAV network, for instance my autonomous car or the guy who uses my car, will each have a unique identity, called DAV Identity. The information about each Identity like the transaction history, will be stored and tracked in a distributed way on the blockchain.
2. Discovery: Using a peer-to-peer protocol, this part of the network allows the autonomous vehicles to discover the clients around them and the other services like charging stations.
3. Communication: Needless to say, the next step after the discovery is to communicate with each other. The communication can either be on-blockchain, like my car “asks” for payments from the client, or off-blockchain, like when my car needs some services and it sends out some messages to the providers and the providers reply with their price.
4. Mission Flow: A decentralized communication protocol is in place to ensure that everything goes smoothly, from when you indicate your needs until the service is fulfilled and paid.
5. Payments: The last of piece of puzzle to complete the network is the secure and trustless payment, using DAV tokens.

Team

I believe that I am not the only who is amazed by the team of DAV. They have experts in the field of blockchain, encryption, AI, autonomous vehicles, machine learning, software and marketing.
The CEO and founder, Noam Copel created the world’s first smartphone encryption system.
The CTO and co-founder, Tal Ater is a coder since the age of 8! (I didn’t even know how to type properly at that age) He is also an Invited Expert of W3C Automotive Working Group.

Let’s look at their all-star advisors!

• Giovanni Lanfranchi - Vice President, Global Technology Services at IBM
• Dr. Alan Messer - Former CTO of Global Connected Consumer eXperience at General Motors
• Biren Gandhi - Former Head of Drone Business at Cisco
• Dr. Scott Horowitz - Former Space Shuttle astronaut & NASA Associate Administrator.
• Jay Adelson – one of the 2008 Time 100, serial entrepreneur, investor, founder of Equinix.

You know how serious it is when you see so many intelligent people gathered for a project.

Companies under DAV Alliance

Partnership

So far, DAV has succeeded to gather 12 companies from the autonomous vehicle industry under the DAV Alliances. They will be working together to construct the future of autonomous transportation.

• The Association for Unmanned Vehicle System International (AUVSI) - the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and supporting the unmanned systems and robotics industry.
• Copter Express (COEX) – a company specialized in the autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
• Skysence - a Qualcomm Ventures-backed drone technology startup building an automated charging infrastructure for drones.
• Advanced Aircraft Company (AAC) – a manufacturer of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial systems (UAS), who has been working closely with NASA.

Token Distribution

ICO

Date: 30th April to 13rd May
Price: 1 ETH = 10 000 DAV tokens
Minimum contribution: 0.2 ETH
Maximum contribution: no personal cap
Soft cap: 5M
Hard cap: 38M
Available for token sale: 40%
Information about the token supply will be announced next month.

Summary

I think the team is one of the most important reason for the success of a project. You can see that DAV has a very experienced team and they are backed a some very famous advisors. Some people think that DAV is a decentralized-version of Uber. No, DAV is more exciting than that, DAV is paving the way for the economy of autonomous vehicles in the future.
+ Strong team and advisors (IBM, NASA, UPS, SAP, Google)
+ More than 100 contributors on GitHub
+ Innovative idea and no competitor so far
+ Partnerships already established through DAV Alliance
+ MVP available, app for drone-delivery
+ Vesting period of 12 months for team members
- Long roadmap
- Slightly high hard cap