Hello everyone,
I’m Josie from the Aegis Rescue team.
We’re currently submitting Aegis Rescue under Fund 15, and I’d like to share what we’re building and invite feedback from the Cardano community, especially around architecture, RWA design, and real-world feasibility.
This post is not a pitch deck summary.
It’s an open explanation of the problem we’re tackling, the approach we’re taking, and why we believe Cardano is the right foundation for this kind of infrastructure.
The Problem: Rescue Fails During the Wait
In many real-world emergencies, people do not die instantly.
They die while waiting.
Waiting for responders to arrive.
Waiting for terrain to be crossed.
Waiting while injured, exposed, panicking, or bleeding.
This is not a theoretical problem. It happens repeatedly, across geographies and environments.
Case 1: Mount Rinjani, Indonesia (2025)
In June 2025, Juliana Marins, a 26-year-old Brazilian tourist, fell from a ridge while hiking Mount Rinjani, an active volcano in Indonesia.
- She survived the initial fall.
- Medical reports later confirmed she remained alive for approximately 20 minutes, suffering from internal bleeding and blunt force trauma.
- Rescue teams were unable to reach her in time due to steep terrain, fog, and unstable conditions.
Her body was only recovered four days later, after search teams deployed a thermal drone to locate her near the crater wall.
The fatal factor was not the fall alone.
It was the gap between injury and access.
Case 2: Coastal Rescue Delays (Common Pattern)
Similar patterns appear repeatedly in coastal and marine rescue incidents:
- Swimmers or surfers swept offshore by rip currents
- Divers experiencing equipment failure
- Small boats capsizing near rocky coastlines
In many such cases, victims remain visible from shore or vessels, but:
- rescue craft are not immediately available,
- helicopters are grounded by weather,
- or coordination takes too long.
Minutes matter.
But response capacity is often not positioned where or when it is needed.
Case 3: Longcaogou Flash Flood, Sichuan, China (2022)
In August 2022, a sudden mountain flash flood struck Longcaogou, a non-official “wild” scenic area in Sichuan.
- Over 1,000 visitors were present after the location spread on social media as a summer escape.
- Despite warning signs and local patrols, many visitors remained in the riverbed.
- When upstream rainfall triggered a flash flood, the water surged within minutes.
Seven people died.
Rescue personnel arrived quickly after the flood—but by then, the window had closed.
This tragedy highlighted a recurring reality:
even when warnings exist, and responders act in good faith, human-only, reactive rescue systems struggle to scale under sudden, distributed risk.
A Shared Pattern
These cases do not imply that technology alone could have prevented every death.
They illustrate a consistent pattern: the absence of early, accessible response capacity during a survivable window.
Across mountains, coastlines, and rivers, the pattern is consistent:
- The initial incident is often survivable.
- The environment deteriorates faster than responders can arrive.
- Rescue assets are scarce, localized, or idle elsewhere.
- The critical window closes during the wait.
This is the gap Aegis Rescue is designed to address.
Not by replacing human responders,
but by extending early response capacity into the waiting period, when time still matters most.
Why This Is Hard to Solve
Rescue capacity doesn’t scale like software.
It depends on:
- expensive hardware,
- maintenance and replacement cycles,
- trained operators,
- and availability at exactly the right moment.
More importantly, there is currently no simple mechanism for communities to co-own and co-fund rescue-grade assets.
As a result:
- drones are either too few, or
- privately owned and underutilized,
- yet unavailable when emergencies actually occur.
This is not a coordination failure alone, it’s an ownership and allocation problem.
Even with willing responders, assets that are privately owned or idle elsewhere cannot be redeployed when minutes matter.
Our Approach: Drone RWA + Shared Rescue Capacity
Aegis Rescue approaches this problem from the asset layer.
We place the drone asset itself on-chain as RWA.
Not rescue footage.
Not personal data.
This separation is intentional.
Emergency infrastructure requires auditability without surveillance.
What goes on-chain is:
- the asset’s ownership,
- usage rights,
- and allocation rules.
By doing this, rescue drones can shift from isolated private equipment to shared public rescue capacity.
People who cannot afford to own a drone outright can still participate, contribute, and support rescue readiness.
Through Aegis Rescue, individuals become life supporters, helping fund and sustain emergency response infrastructure.
When emergencies occur:
- available drones are dispatched,
- operated by professional local partners,
- following transparent, predefined rules.
Why We’re Building This on Cardano
For emergency-grade systems, predictable execution and explicit authorization matter more than abstract throughput or composability.
We chose Cardano intentionally.
We’re not building a consumer app.
We’re building long-term public infrastructure.
That requires:
- predictable execution for real-world rules,
- low and stable fees so participation remains accessible,
- durable, auditable records for shared ownership over time.
Cardano’s execution model aligns well with these requirements, especially for RWA-based coordination where clarity, determinism, and long-term integrity matter more than speed-at-all-costs.
Current Progress
So far, we’ve:
- drafted the drone RWA asset model,
- designed the MVP dispatch and allocation flow,
- and started preparing pilot onboarding with local operator partners.
This approach wasn’t realistic a few years ago.
Today, it finally is.
What We’re Asking in Fund 15
Fund 15 allows us to validate the model.
Our goal is to establish a reusable, long-term rescue infrastructure primitive on Cardano.
Through Fund 15, we’re seeking support to build:
- the drone RWA onboarding framework,
- allocation and dispatch rules MVP,
- and controlled real-world pilot scenarios.
Our vision is simple:
Not everyone can own a rescue drone.
But everyone can be part of rescue capacity.
Aegis Rescue aims to turn life-saving response into a shared public good.
Feedback Welcome
We’re building this in the open and would truly appreciate:
- architectural critiques,
- RWA design feedback,
- thoughts on real-world operational risks,
- or similar efforts you’ve seen in or outside the ecosystem.
Catalyst proposal link (for reference):
Thanks for reading, and looking forward to the discussion.
The Aegis Rescue Team