The New Infrastructure Layer Is In The Sky: Blockchain Drone Networks

A drone flies above a busy port city, capturing container yards in structured hexagonal zones—illustrating blockchain-coordinated spatial data capture at scale.

Infinity Advisory LLC

A new class of infrastructure is emerging—one that operates above our cities, outside traditional institutions, and is owned by the people who help build it. At the intersection of AI, climate response, and real-time spatial data, blockchain-verified drone networks are beginning to challenge satellites as the dominant source of Earth imagery.

One startup, Spexi, is helping lead that shift.

When Satellites Fall Short

When a wildfire tears through a hillside or a logistics firm needs post-storm damage data in hours, not days, satellites can’t keep up. For decades, Earth observation has depended on slow, expensive, and carbon-intensive systems: orbiting satellites, manned aircraft, and static site surveys.

Spexi, a startup based in Vancouver, BC, is flipping that model. By enlisting thousands of microdrone pilots to operate within a standardized flight protocol, the company is building a real-time, blockchain-verified imaging network that’s faster, cheaper, greener—and far more scalable.

What DePIN Really Means And Why It Matters

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, or DePINs, are emerging as a new blueprint for how physical systems such as compute, connectivity, and environmental sensing can be deployed. Rather than relying on centralized entities to build and maintain infrastructure, DePINs distribute that responsibility—and the value that flows from it—to the individuals who help operate them.

In Spexi’s case, that infrastructure layer is Earth imagery.

“Most infrastructure is built top-down—slow, opaque, and exclusive,” said Spexi CEO, Bill Lakeland, in my interview with him. “We’re building it bottom-up. Aerial data is just the beginning.”

In this model, Spexi is more than a drone company. It becomes a spatial protocol serving carbon markets, AI models, insurance claims, smart city systems, and logistics providers that require verified, high-resolution, and frequently updated ground truth.

From Fixed-Wing To Fly-To-Earn

Before launching Spexi, Lakeland spent two decades in traditional aerial mapping, operating fixed-wing aircraft with high-resolution cameras to capture imagery for municipalities and insurers. But as demand grew for more frequent and localized imagery, he saw the economics of traditional mapping collapse—too slow, too costly, and too infrequent to meet the pace of climate-driven disasters.

“You can add more planes, more pilots—but it’s never enough,” Lakeland said. “What we needed was ubiquity. And that meant changing who flies, and why.”

The answer was a fly-to-earn model. Spexi now coordinates a fleet of sub-250g drones—lightweight enough to avoid stricter aviation requirements in most jurisdictions—flown autonomously by distributed pilots via a mobile app. These drones capture 25-acre tiles known as Spexigons, creating a uniform spatial grid across diverse terrain.

Onboarding takes minutes. A pilot downloads the Spexi app, verifies their license (where required), links a crypto wallet, and is ready to fly. Once near a mission zone, they connect their drone, tap “fly,” and supervise a fully autonomous capture. Images are uploaded via the Spexi web app, and the pilot is rewarded once the flight is validated. The process is virtually seemless.

“Most people don’t even hear the drone,” said Alec Wilson, Spexi’s cofounder and COO. “It’s just a quiet, nearly invisible layer in the sky.”

To date, over 4,000 pilots have flown nearly 100,000 missions, covering more than 2.3 million acres across 170 cities in North America and Europe.

Proof Of Capture: Verifying The Physical World

Spexi’s core innovation isn’t in the drones—it’s in the data integrity baked into each mission.

Each flight generates a Proof of Capture: a hashed packet of GPS telemetry, altitude, timestamp, and image metadata recorded on-chain in real time. These are cryptographically verifiable receipts of where, when, and how an image was captured.

Accuracy is paramount. “We’re not just uploading images,” Lakeland explained. “We’re minting [soulbound NFTs] that prove an image was captured by a compliant drone, at a specific time, place, and elevation.”

The system was originally deployed on Flow but has since migrated to Ethereum Layer 2 Base, enabling low-cost validation and compatibility with the broader EVM ecosystem.

According to the team, metadata is sourced directly from the capture app and includes geolocation, timestamp, and file size—key elements to ensure submitted images match the claimed mission and can’t be spoofed. This architecture makes Spexi’s data not just visually accurate, but cryptographically trusted—critical for downstream use in AI pipelines, insurance claims, or regulatory-grade climate models.

Governance: From Company To Protocol

To avoid centralizing control over what may become a globally relevant data layer, Spexi established the LayerDrone Foundation—an independent nonprofit that oversees the smart contracts, economic logic, and access controls behind the LayerDrone Protocol.

According to Wilson, “[w]e’re building this to be community-owned infrastructure. The Foundation manages the protocol. Spexi is just the first major contributor.”

Over time, the team expects tokens to govern protocol upgrades, incentive structures, and access policies, drawing inspiration from prior DePIN networks like Helium and Render, but tuned for the unique demands of drone-based capture.

Designing For Incentives, Not Exploits

Today, pilots are paid in fiat and accrue non-transferable reputation scores based on mission performance. These scores—tied to verified flight data—will eventually unlock access to higher-tier missions and token-based rewards.

“You can’t fake your way into high rep,” Wilson said. “Every point is based on verified capture. That gives us integrity—and pilots a stake.”

The system is being designed to avoid the pitfalls that plagued early DePIN networks, such as Sybil attacks and speculative gaming. Geographic diversity and flight quality matter. Eventually, reputation may become a requirement for accessing sensitive zones or validating other contributors’ data.

From Climate To Claims: Where The Data Flows

Spexi’s ambitions go beyond image resolution. The platform aims to be a trusted data layer for real-world systems where verifiability matters. While the imagery supports insurance claims, city planning, and AI model training, it is not a substitute for licensed land surveys. The platform does not produce court-admissible boundary maps or official land maps.

During Canada’s 2023 wildfire season, Spexi imagery was used to assess damage in Kelowna and Shuswap, enabling faster, more informed, and safer decision-making by emergency responders. In another case, aerial imagery helped stakeholders monitor a rising river in British Columbia that posed severe flood risks. And after devastating fires in the Palisades region of Los Angeles, Spexi imagery allowed residents and officials to verify house-by-house damage—sometimes identifying the only home left standing on a block.

“Due to the massive ability of speed and scale that this network enables, it is well-suited to be used during times when the aerial perspective is priceless,” the team noted.

Cities are also tapping Spexi for urban tree canopy tracking and infrastructure assessments. Insurance firms use it to benchmark post-disaster scenes against standardized Spexigon archives. And in San Francisco, Spexi is capturing dense imaging missions using Gaussian Splatting, supporting spatial computing models that reconstruct photorealistic environments for AI agents and simulation.

The platform is also preparing to serve carbon markets. With validation underway by Greenlines Technology, Spexi is quantifying a 99.7% emissions reduction versus fixed-wing flights and developing MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, Verification) tools to support reforestation and permanence tracking.

“Our data gives real-time ground truth,” Lakeland said. “Especially in carbon, where permanence matters—if a forest burns, that offset should be void.”

Composability And Compliance At Scale

Because Spexi’s drones fall below 250 grams and operate under strict protocols, missions comply with aviation regulations in most jurisdictions without requiring pilot licenses. The company also adheres to strict privacy standards, redacting faces, license plates, and private property details.

“We hold ourselves to street view standards,” Wilson said. “No facial recognition, no personally identifiable data, no rogue flying.”

Users currently access Spexi imagery via the World Viewer web app, which can render panoramic drone captures within 15 minutes of upload. APIs and developer portals are now rolling out, with orthomosaic products coming soon—enabling Spexi’s data to plug directly into third-party tools, dashboards, or AI pipelines.

Signal, Not Summary

In a world increasingly shaped by climate risk, AI automation, and decentralized coordination, infrastructure must evolve beyond centralized planning and institutional control. It must be fast, composable, and verifiable—owned by the people who build and use it.

Spexi’s vision is to make high-resolution Earth imagery not just more accessible, but more trustworthy.

“We’re building the most accessible ultra-high resolution Earth imagery network in history,” the company said, “powered by drones, owned by users, and designed for a future where geospatial data is open, decentralized, and fuels the next generation of real-world intelligence.”

Satellites see from afar. Planes scan by schedule. Spexi completes the picture—turning everyday drones into a living, trusted layer of the Earth.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of Infinity Advisory LLC and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organization. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice.