How NATIX plans to disrupt autonomous mapping with decentralized data

NATIX Community has formally launched its 360Data Subnet (Subnet 72) on the Bittensor decentralized AI community, representing a step ahead in its mission to modernize mapping and autonomous driving by decentralized, real-world knowledge processing.

Powered by a Solana- (SOL) based mostly decentralized bodily infrastructure community of good cameras, NATIX combines high-volume, street-level knowledge assortment with scalable machine studying by Bittensor (TAO), crypto.information can solely report.

The subnet, incubated by Bittensor infrastructure accomplice Yuma, consumes 360° video feeds captured from NATIX-enabled Tesla autos and different cell gadgets. It then processes the info into AI fashions that enhance real-time map-making and car autonomy.

The transfer is in line with developments seen throughout the autonomous mobility trade. Notably, corporations like Uber are investing in artificial simulation and bespoke knowledge collections to higher handle their self-driving applied sciences. Nonetheless, that is costly and lags behind real-world adjustments.

To deal with this, NATIX is eyeing a worldwide neighborhood of over 250,000 drivers who collectively logged over 170 million kilometers by smartphone and VX360 gadget utilization.

VX360 and decentralized knowledge coaching

The VX360, developed in collaboration with Seize, leverages Tesla’s present digital camera techniques to gather 360° imagery with out requiring costly new {hardware}. The information is processed each within the cloud and on the edge smartphones detecting components like visitors lights and indicators in actual time. Extra intensive classification is dealt with off-device.

By way of Bittensor’s decentralized framework, NATIX miners are rewarded for coaching and enhancing AI fashions on the subnet, that are then redeployed throughout the NATIX Edge Community.

“The NATIX 360Data Subnet on Bittensor represents the convergence of Bodily AI and decentralized intelligence,” stated NATIX CEO and co-founder Alireza Ghods. “By decentralizing knowledge evaluation, we allow the continual enchancment of AI fashions, considerably enhancing mapping accuracy, autonomous car security, and real-world responsiveness.”

The subnet’s first focus is roadwork detection, a vital software for each mapping platforms and autonomous car navigation. Over the longer-term, NATIX hopes to develop its operations to incorporate pothole detection and infrastructure evaluation. Finally, NATIX expects to offer a full situation classification to assist autonomous car coaching.

Q&A with NATIX CEO Alireza Ghods

To raised perceive the affect of NATIX’s newest launch, crypto.information spoke with Alireza Ghods, CEO and co-founder of NATIX. The dialog focuses on the corporate’s method to scaling decentralized knowledge seize, why it believes its knowledge can compete with tech giants, and the way it plans to create actual demand for its token economic system.

The complete Q&A is under:

crypto.information: Tech giants like Waymo, Tesla, and others and even Mobileye have spent years and billions of {dollars} gathering driving knowledge and creating autonomous tech. What makes NATIX imagine it may provide knowledge or AI providers at a comparable high quality? Crowdsourced knowledge is nice for scale, however can crowd-collected digital camera footage actually match the precision of devoted mapping autos?

Alireza Ghods: Information assortment for mapping and autonomous driving is tremendous costly. Giant corporations that gather this footage aren’t sharing it as they use that knowledge to have an edge on the product and providing. None of those gamers have been gathering knowledge on the scale that NATIX can do in a crowdsourced method. The most important open-source dataset for autonomous driving is Studying to Drive (L2D), a dataset in-built collaboration between two initiatives collected with equivalent sensor suites put in on 60 EVs operated by driving faculties in solely German cities over the span of three years, which resulted in solely 5k hours logged. For the reason that launch of the VX360 on Might 2nd, 2025, we now have already collected 2k hours of driving in solely 10 days, and with only one/3 of the overall pre-ordered gadgets reside solely within the US.

In the case of the precision in mapping, NATIX could not have the precision and high quality of devoted mapping autos, however the sheer dimension of the community and knowledge collected compensates for it, making the top end result pretty much as good as knowledge collected by devoted mapping autos. Take Seize, for instance. Seize constructed their complete mapping resolution based mostly on crowdsourced efforts, leading to maps extra correct than Google Maps in SE Asia. For crowdsourced efforts to succeed, you want a big community of drivers/contributors. With over 250K registered drivers, NATIX does have such a community, and it’s the most important digital camera DePIN community globally.

CN: Accumulating 360° video from doubtlessly hundreds (if no more) of automobiles and telephones in actual time screams of a large technical problem. How is NATIX dealing with knowledge ingestion and processing at scale?

AG: For knowledge collected with the VX360, the compute we carry out for ScenGen is sort of heavy and can’t be carried out on the Edge. We do the processing on the cloud stage. The information shared by customers is simply uploaded after they’re linked to their residence Wi-Fi connection.

With that stated, we use our smartphone community, which has edge compute energy, to detect map attributes corresponding to visitors indicators and visitors lights in real-time.

CN: Are you able to describe the scaling technique: how will you go from a pilot with a couple of hundred Teslas or telephones to a deployment with, say, 100k+ gadgets streaming knowledge, with out the system breaking or prices skyrocketing?

AG: The VX360 gadget is sort of cost-effective. With a 350$ gadget, we faucet into 360° street-level imagery, whereas additionally offering utility for the drivers. Our technique is tapping into commodity {hardware}. Everybody owns a smartphone, and Tesla autos already come geared up with 360° cameras, so it’s only a matter of tapping into what’s already on the market. If we wished to construct a 360° digital camera, it could be 20-100x dearer than VX360 by way of {hardware} price, and it could not be scalable as a crowd-sourced resolution.

As for additional scaling, we’re additionally in dialogue with companions who need to function a fleet of VX360s. This could be fleet house owners or integrators who need to sponsor the price of the gadget for reward sharing. For instance, we’re in dialogue with a Tesla fleet proprietor with over 3,000 Tesla autos of their community. We’re additionally within the strategy of constructing fleet administration functionalities for the fleet operators to extend the utility of our product and transcend crypto rewards.

CN: Following up from the above query, do you see these massive gamers as prospects of NATIX’s knowledge (i.e. you’ll promote them supplemental knowledge) or as rivals you must outperform? If it’s the latter, the place particularly do you assume your decentralized method offers you an edge towards far better-funded operations with full management of their fleets?

AG: Now we have Seize as our buyer, and we’re within the strategy of closing a couple of of the most important autonomous driving gamers, each as direct prospects for the info and companions for constructing varied merchandise for autonomous driving.

Each massive participant is a possible buyer, if not now, then sooner or later. Among the greater gamers have invested tens of millions into gathering their very own datasets, which quickly will grow to be outdated because the roads are continually altering. Even when some inform us they don’t want our knowledge at present, they are going to want it quickly sufficient.

Nonetheless, the AD corporations which have invested in their very own datasets aren’t bigger than 20% of the market. The remaining have both not spent a lot capital to gather knowledge and can want NATIX’s knowledge, or they’re presently counting on their prospects’ knowledge (if any), however can not use it to enhance the standard of their fashions for different prospects. This can be a actual bottleneck for these corporations to create a holistic AD stack that may be monetized for all automotive shoppers.

CN: NATIX isn’t alone in making an attempt to decentralize bodily infrastructure. We’ve seen initiatives like Hivemapper dominate headlines a number of years again or DIMO (car knowledge) try comparable crowdsourced fashions. Their street to success (hehe, pun supposed) has been tough with restricted consumer uptake, token worth collapse, and many others. What classes has NATIX’s realized or what method are you taking that differs from people who struggled?

AG: There are additionally profitable fashions like Geodnet. I imagine the winner right here is the one which focuses on protocol income and has a correct mechanism for worth accrual to the token (e.g. buyback and burn). Many of those initiatives undergo from an absence of Protocol income or poor tokenomics (lack of worth accrual). On this case, NATIX is nearer to Geodnet and is following the identical technique.

Moreover, you need to take a look at every enterprise mannequin individually. For instance, Hivemapper’s front-facing dashcams gather high-quality street-level imagery for mapping, however NATIX’s 360° knowledge can cater not solely to mapping but additionally to autonomous driving and bodily AI. 360° video knowledge is the holy grail of street-level visible knowledge, and never solely is it price 5-10x greater than Hivemapper’s knowledge, but it surely opens the door to numerous new mapmaking use circumstances (e.g., POI detection with facet cameras).

Furthermore, the 360° knowledge collected can be utilized for Bodily AI, which is a a lot greater subject (ever since NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang’s massive announcement on the stage at CES 2025). NATIX gives knowledge range appropriate for the coaching, testing, and validation of the autonomous driving stack and Bodily AI at a fraction of the price of centralized options that corporations like Nvidia and Uber invested tens of millions to develop. This knowledge is a painkiller for the simulation-to-reality and reality-to-simulation course of in Bodily AI improvement.

That’s the reason we imagine we’re fixing a a lot greater drawback, which the trade is able to pay for TODAY.. Be aware that automobiles function with a surrounding digital camera system; due to this fact, coaching, testing, and validation of the autonomous driving stack is simply attainable with 360° knowledge and can’t be carried out with front-facing dashcam knowledge.

CN: Past being a reward mechanism, what’s the precise utility of the $NATIX token inside this ecosystem? Will knowledge purchasers or AI builders want to make use of $NATIX or TAO tokens to entry StreetVision’s providers? If not, what is going to drive demand for $NATIX?

AG: These are two separate ecosystems with completely different performance. NATIX is specializing in knowledge curation, whereas the StreetVision Subnet focuses on (sure) perception extraction and AI mannequin creation.

Every of those ecosystems generates its personal worth and has its personal worth accrual mechanism for his or her token. If anybody is within the NATIX knowledge, the worth accrual goes in direction of the $NATIX token by the Protocol Income and buyback and burn mechanism. For these within the insights or AI fashions generated by the StreetVision Subnet, the income generated might be used for worth accrual in direction of $dTAO (and partially in direction of $NATIX as the info that was used for such perception and/or fashions belongs is supplied by NATIX).

Moreover, $NATIX is used for the protocol governance and securing the community. That is carried out through our staking platform, which permits customers to take part in protocol governance. Validators within the StreetVision Subnet are additionally required to stake $NATIX.

CN: Your strategic partnership with Yuma provides a stage of credibility, but it surely additionally raises centralization considerations. DCG has truly invested in NATIX, and Yuma has been instrumental in launching Bittensor subnets. How do you make sure that neither Yuma nor different heavyweight backers will dominate Subnet 72’s course or rewards?

AG: Anybody can run a validator for our subnet. Certainly, we’re working with two different main Bittensor validator gamers that may also run validator nodes. Additionally, we eliminated staking or $dTAO holding necessities for miners as we wished to make sure an open ecosystem. As you realize, miner centralization is even an even bigger concern than validator because the output of the community is determined by them.

CN: What present use circumstances are you able to level to for the StreetVision Subnet? For instance, is Seize already consuming NATIX’s knowledge to replace their maps in Southeast Asia proper now, or is that simply an MOU for future collaboration?

AG: StreetVision’s first process might be real-time roadwork detection. Detecting and classifying roadwork in real-time is essential for mapping updates and AV reliability. Extra use circumstances added later will embrace detecting potholes, street indicators, littering, and infrastructure monitoring. StreetVision Subnet may also later embrace evaluation and classification of driving movies into situations from routine visitors situations to uncommon “edge circumstances,” as situation classification is tremendous essential for situation technology for autonomous driving and Bodily AI.

Seize is presently utilizing NATIX’s knowledge to construct their pipelines for the US and EU markets, and they’re a paying buyer already.

Because the VX360 simply went reside on Might 2nd, we want some preliminary knowledge to construct pattern datasets, that are required by autonomous driving prospects. We’re in business negotiations with dozens of autonomous driving corporations. We’re additionally working with a couple of of the highest autonomous driving analysis labs to create cutting-edge merchandise for simulation-to-reality and reality-to-simulation, which we are going to announce within the coming months.