Decentralised Drone Platform

Soar is a decentralised platform for high-quality drone content that connects customers with content creators in a secure, trustless and distributed blockchain community.

The first stage of the implementation of Soar will be the creation of a marketplace for drone content including still images, video, aerial maps and other specialist drone content. The Soar marketplace will allow drone operators to upload and sell content to other Soar users anywhere in the world. The Soar marketplace has the potential to allow an exponential increase in the value of mapping data and drone content by realising the untapped financial potential of existing drone content. Furthermore, by securing the integrity of drone content metadata via smart contracts, Soar automatically and transparently publishes the location, time and equipment type used to capture content onto the blockchain. The use of blockchain technology validates the authenticity of the footage to ensure the integrity of drone content and fight the problems such as ‘fake news’.

However, this is not the end-game. Progressively, by aggregating the content collected from thousands of drone operators, Soar will in due course create a dynamic database for the world’s first super-map at an unprecedented level of detail. All connected using blockchain technology to share data.

Leveraging the expansion in drone usage by both business and consumers, Soar will provide an opportunity for drone owners to monetise their content. Commercial drone sales in 2017 were expected to exceed US $1 billion. The expanding drone market is largely driven by the tremendous growth in commercial applications of drone content and footage in industries such as infrastructure, mining, agriculture, journalism and real estate with an addressable market estimated to reach $127 billion by 2020. The growth rates in the market have been estimated to be between 15-25% CAGR over the next five years.

Despite the rapid growth of the drone industry, there is an absence of a suitable marketplace for drone content or facility for licensed drone operators to fully optimise and monetise their content. Soar will directly address this lack of a market for content. Furthermore, there has not been direct access to mapping technology which would allow this content to effectively seed a super-map platform and take advantage of the extremely high-resolution content of which drones are capable.

The Soar marketplace will allow:

- Buyers to easily locate and buy drone content already on Soar;

- Buyers to offer a SkyBounty on an area which rewards drone operators to upload content to match the SkyBounty needs; or

- Drone operators to upload content under a SkySponsor arrangement for sale in an open market environment.

Soar will provide this platform for content providers and purchasers, transacting with the SkyMap token (Symbol:SKYM), a utility token that unlocks a range of capabilities on the Soar Platform. Owning SKYM tokens allows customers to utilise the platform and rewards the content creators.The SKYM tokens unlock key features of the Soar platform by allowing the user to:

- Purchase drone content;

- Create SkyBounties for specific areas;

- Qualify individuals and organisations as a SkySponsor on the Soar platform; and

- Provide the economic initiative for the eventual seeding of the world’s first super-map.

Buying drone content from the Soar platform using SKYM is a simple process of browsing and searching the Soar platform for the desired content and buying it with SKYM tokens. This transaction is recorded on the blockchain. Soar’s SkySponsor model allows for curation of the content as the SkySponsors will only support content that is likely to be used, thereby increasing the overall content quality uploaded to Soar. The driver for the SkySponsor model is extremely compelling as it effectively proves the economics for seeding the Soar super-map. The super-map will be both dynamic and temporal; over time it will evolve to only exhibit the ‘best of the best’ imagery. The basis of this super-map is not limited to merely a simple blockchain application, rather, it will serve as the foundation for an unprecedented mapping protocol to power other blockchain solutions which require mapping and imagery inputs.

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