The company Extra S.A.S. was founded by Charlie Durand, Laurent Caraffa, and Dhruv Malik.
Charlie Durand is a sales and product professional who has faced the challenges of poor 3D mapping in her previous entrepreneurial ventures.
Laurent Caraffa holds a PhD in Computer Vision and is a researcher on 3D surface reconstruction at the French Mapping Institut (IGN).
Dhruv Malik is a senior cybersecurity and cryptography engineer with experience in web3.
Extra Labs is developing a decentralized protocol to incentivize geospatial data acquisition. The aim is to create a detailed and constantly updating map of the world through global collaboration. We achieve this by leveraging blockchain technology to efficiently remunerates contributors by redistributing the value paid by data consumers.
Our initial focus is on 3D data, collecting point clouds from LiDAR and photogrammetry technologies.
Companies and governments spend billions of dollars each year trying to keep their maps up-to-date. Until recently, the data acquisition process has been very unscalable, forcing these organizations to maintain fleets of cars and low-flying aircraft equipped with sensors. The result in term of recency and completeness is far from satisfactory and the industry is looking for a new model.
Many industries have a crucial need of these various map data (road map, building footprint, street view imagery, 3D models, point-of-interest...). For example logistics, smart city, mobility or immersive technologies.
Our initial focus is on producing detailed, accurate 3D data. Indeed, this modeling provides a comprehensive understanding of the scenes, forming a solid basis for extension to other data types.
Our protocol uses a blockchain token to distribute the value paid by data consumers to data contributors. Here is a simplified version of the process:
- A data contributor shares point cloud datasets, using either a front-end or an API.
- The protocol confronts this dataset with the data it already holds.
- If the data is deemed valuable (brings new information about the place) then the protocol mints an amount of token proportional to the value estimated. The data contributor's account is credited with the token.
- When the data contributor wants to transfer this money to their bank account, the token is sold on the internal market (with liquidity pool).
- A data consumer's account buys the token, which works like a credit for data/API request.
- The data consumer request data. This consumes the token/credit, destroying it. New token is bought.
The entire process is transparent to both data contributors and data consumers. They do not interact directly with the blockchain. Data consumers pay a fixed price in fiat, similar to how they would use the Google Maps billing console. The amount of money data providers receive from each token/credit depends on the token's price at the time. If many data consumers use the system, the token price increases, and that value gets distributed to data providers through this system. The opposite is also true. This creates a network effect where the protocol's success attracts more contributors, improving the data available, attracting more data consumers, increasing the token price, and further attracting more contributors.
All resource providers are incentivized through tokens. Data providers receive about 70% of the tokens, while storage and compute power providers get 10%, and algorithm providers (Extra Labs) receive 20%.
Once the data is acquired by the protocol, it goes through a processing pipeline to merge and transform it into various 3D formats required by data consumers (point clouds, 3D Tiles, CityGML, etc.).
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Our 3D offering is designed for companies who already use detailed 3D maps coming from point clouds but struggle with accessing this data at scale and for an affordable price. Our first customers are either smart city or AR/VR companies.
Our team is currently working on a processing pipeline to merge free point clouds from open data projects or partnerships. This will produce the first iteration of a data source. Check out the access data page to learn more about this phase.
We expect to start implementing the blockchain mechanism to remunerate contributions in Q1 2025. A full version of the protocol should be released in the second half of 2025.
