Hylaq · Sky

Every cubic meter of sky
above your head.

Stand under the airspace you want. Pick an altitude band. Stake $1. Own the column of sky from ground to 400m. Earn when drones, AR content, ad balloons, or eVTOL corridors route through your sky.

Live satellite

The ground is real. The sky above it is now real estate too.

Pan any city. Green outlines are claimed ground squares below. Every one has five claimable 10m airspace slabs stacked above it — from canopy drones to eVTOL taxis.

Jump to
Loading satellite…

Green outlines are claimed squares. Click any 10m² cell to view its detail page. Zoom in past level 15 to see individual claims. Satellite tiles © Esri.

The paradigm break

Airspace rights are a 20th-century fiction every government regulates but no human owns.

In most jurisdictions, property rights theoretically extend upward ad coelum — to the heavens. In practice, the FAA controls everything above 500 feet, municipalities carve the middle, and drone operators freely cross private land. Homeowners have no protocol-native way to charge for transit, consent, or use.

Hylaq Sky makes it real. Every 10m-tall slab of airspace above a Hylaq Grid square is a cryptographically addressable asset. The claimant is an @handle. Drone operators pay transit fees cell-by-cell, auto-settled per event. AR platforms pay to render content in your volume. Balloon advertisers pay for residency. The airspace becomes the toll road of the drone economy.

How it's divided

Five bands. Each 10m tall. All claimable separately.

Canopy

0–10m
$12B/yr

Trees, signs, poles, hovering drones. Street-level AR. High-frequency events.

Demand: Retail AR, curbside delivery hovering, security filming

Drone

10–50m
$180B/yr

Delivery drones, inspection, short-range filming. The bulk of unit economics live here.

Demand: Amazon Prime Air, Zipline, Matternet, Wing

Aerial

50–120m
$40B/yr

Line-of-sight comms, balloon ISPs, long-range drones. The infrastructure layer.

Demand: Starlink-adjacent balloons, mesh comms, long-range mapping

eVTOL

120–400m
$120B/yr

Air taxis, cargo eVTOLs, high-altitude corridors. Premium pricing.

Demand: Joby, Archer, Lilium, cargo eVTOL ops

Above 400m: FAA Class A airspace. Non-claimable on Hylaq.

Why now

Four industries need a transit toll rail.

$180B/yr by 2030

Drone delivery

Amazon Prime Air, Zipline, Matternet. Every flight crosses thousands of private airspaces. Hylaq Sky is the protocol toll road — one integration, universal transit rights.

$120B/yr by 2030

eVTOL corridors

Air taxi launches need transit through residential zones. Insurance, lawsuits, NIMBY activism are the current bottleneck. Hylaq Sky compensates landowners cell-by-cell.

$80B/yr by 2030

AR overlays

Apple Vision Pro, Snap Lenses, Niantic. Every AR content render owes the underlying volume a micropayment. Today: nobody pays. Tomorrow: Hylaq Sky pays whoever claimed the cube.

$30B/yr

Location-aware advertising

Balloon ads, drone-projected logos, atmospheric displays. Impossible without micro-leasing. Hylaq Sky turns every claimed volume into a standalone ad inventory unit.

Why only Hylaq

The stack needs four primitives. Nobody else has all of them.

Hylaq Grid ground system

Sky parcels stack above Grid squares. Sky can't exist without the 10m² planetary-scale ground coordinate system we already shipped.

@handle identity + Veritas

Claims need proof-of-presence. Without Hylaq's humanity primitives, drone-fleet bots claim every famous piece of sky in the first hour.

Loadit non-custodial settlement

Micro-payments per drone transit settle to the claimant's wallet without a bank in the loop. Stripe can't route thousands of $0.05 fees per day without fees eating it.

Resolver routing

Drone operators POST a single path to /api/sky/usage and Hylaq distributes payment across every touched cell. One integration, millions of landlords.

Shipped — April 2026

Not a whitepaper. Running code.

Prisma schema
SkyParcel + SkyClaim + SkyUsage + 3 enums + 3 Handle back-relations + GridSquare link for "column above" queries.
Altitude math lib
Pure browser-safe functions: meter ↔ band index ↔ parcel id, band descriptors, altIndexesInRange for drone paths.
Claim engine
claimSky / releaseSky / transferSky with proof-of-presence, ground-owner gating (by right vs by stake), 30m tolerance.
8 API routes
claim / detail / resolve / wallet / release / transfer / usage ingest / earnings.
Usage ingestion
recordUsage / recordTransitPath / recordBatch. One endpoint handles single events, batch, and multi-cell drone traces.
4 consumer pages
/sky landing with band table + /sky/parcel/[id] + /sky/wallet/[handle] + /sky/claim with GPS + altitude slider.

Property rights just went volumetric.

First drone delivery network to integrate owns the standard for transit rights. First air taxi operator owns eVTOL corridors. Whoever ships Hylaq Sky first wins the toll booth of the drone economy.