How gamers can earn crypto cash hunting for broken manholes

ON A recent sweltering afternoon, a dozen people met up in Valenzuela, a city just outside Manila, to search for manholes and utility poles and snap photos of them.

The infrastructure hunters were there because they found each other on the Discord channel for Tekkon, a Pokemon Go-like app that uses crowdsourcing to collect information that public utilities need to keep power lines and water networks operating smoothly.

By gamifying infrastructure data and selling it to utilities, Tekkon wants to help lower the cost of maintenance by providing incentives for citizens to gather information from their communities. Tekkon lets users take dog avatars for “walks” around cities, taking photos along the way to earn points that are convertible into cryptocurrency.

“We’re doing this because we want to help our local community,” said Isaiah Demdam, a 21-year-old college student who began organising Tekkon meet-ups in the Philippines area after learning about similar activities in Japan. 

Tekkon was introduced late last year by the Whole Earth Foundation, a non-profit started by Takashi Kato. The Japanese entrepreneur previously founded Fracta, a startup that uses software to identify the weak points in urban water networks to help cities, utilities and construction companies pinpoint the decay of pipes before they break ground.

“I see a lot of inefficiencies in the infrastructure field,” said Kato, citing monopolies in utilities like water and gas as the main reason. “There’s no competition. I can do something in order to provide more efficiency to infrastructure.” 

With much of Japan’s infrastructure constructed during the post-war boom years, the government is increasingly concerned that maintenance costs are ballooning, while cities are running out of money as the country’s population ages and social security spending rapidly increases. Utilities reluctant to pass on maintenance costs to local residents aren’t making fixes fast enough to keep up with the speed of decay, according to Kato.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism estimates that by early 2033, more than two-thirds of highway bridges, half of tunnels and 24 per cent of sewer pipes in Japan will be more than 50 years old. In 2021, part of a water pipe bridge in western Wayakama prefecture collapsed, affecting water supply to some 60,000 households. Some four million manholes have passed their useful lifespan in Japan, according to Kato. Natural disasters such as earthquakes and typhoons can also topple utility poles.

Data collected by Tekkon users can be sold to utility companies in order to help them address potential issues that might result in higher maintenance costs. One of its partners in Japan is Tohoku Electric Power Co, which serves the country’s north-east region, and it is in talks with other utility companies in the country. Tekkon has already gathered photos of 1.8 million manholes in Japan out of 15 million in the country, according to the Whole Earth Foundation.

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Demdam, who said he learned about Tekkon through Filipino influencers on Facebook, said damaged manholes or drains strewn with trash are a particularly serious problem in the typhoon-prone country, and that childhood memories of wading through floodwaters motivates him to help local authorities improve infrastructure. Another problem is the large, messy clusters of wires strung from utility poles ubiquitous in the Philippines, which he calls “spider webs”.

Tekkon is most active in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia for now, according to Kato. While civic pride might be a motivating factor for people to gather infrastructure data, Kato felt that users also need to be financially incentivised, given the sheer scale of collecting such information. Tekkon has more than 128,000 active users, of which 90,000 are in the Philippines. Some 30,000 photos are uploaded each day.

Tekkon currently does not yet sell data to utility companies in the Philippines, but may soon have enough to offer them.

The foundation introduced in September its own token called Whole Earth Coin, which is listed on the BitMart crypto exchange. It’s convertible into fiat currency, and in Japan to cash on Line Pay, a payment service affiliated with the popular chat app. Kato said Tekkon’s virtual currency is a very powerful draw in poorer South-east Asian countries. Tekkon hasn’t launched in the US yet due to tough crypto regulations.

“I’m currently in college and its very expensive to study here,” said Demdam, who said that the most he ever earned from Tekkon was about US$100 a day when he had a day off dedicated to hunting. “Earning US$50 a day is very, very important for us.” BLOOMBERG