'The fake miner incident reflects the global influence of the Roam ecosystem and its popularity.'
Recently, the development of the DeWi track project Roam ecosystem has been constantly hitting high points, with the number of self-built nodes recently exceeding 980,000, making it the DePIN project with the largest node scale. At the same time, one month after the launch of its eSIM product, the ecosystem users have experienced explosive growth, with the user base growing from 750,000 to over a million. As Roam's popularity continues to ferment, 'fake miners' claiming to be associated with Roam have also appeared in the market.
The Roam 'fake miner' incident.
Recently, Twitter KOL @SEFATUBA3 revealed that many users encountered scammers when purchasing miners on Roam's Discord. These scammers impersonated Roam Foundation staff in Roam's Discord group and guided users interested in purchasing miners to buy their counterfeit miners, most of which were sold to South Korea and Taiwan. They also advised users wanting to buy miners to strictly recognize official channels.
It is reported that currently several Roam miners on sale, including the latest AC device Rainier MAX60 router and the AP device Baker MAX30, are in high demand, making them hard to obtain. Fake miners can sell thousands of units in a single day, indicating their popularity.
In fact, at an event held in South Korea on December 3, which was promoted as being related to the Roam Foundation, companies from Taiwan and a South Korean company claimed to be Asian manufacturers and distributors. Although the event related to Roam was crowded, the Roam Foundation clarified that its employees did not participate in the event and were not aware of its content. Moreover, the individual introduced as a Roam Foundation employee at the event had no affiliation with the foundation. These impersonators of Roam Foundation staff, distributors, and manufacturers may be the source of the counterfeit miners flowing into the market.
In addition, the Roam Foundation also provided further clarification. On one hand, the Roam Foundation has no cooperation with Amazon; the Amazon Point Coin project mentioned at the Korean event is unrelated to the Roam Foundation, and the official website is the only channel for miner sales. At the same time, the Taiwanese company's claim of manufacturing and distributing 'Roam mining' equipment is also not true. The official Roam products are limited to Roam OG Miner, MAX60, and MAX30 devices, and the manufacturing and distribution of Roam devices globally has always been strictly managed.
Thus, the truth behind the fake miner incident is becoming clearer. Similarly, the fake miner incident reflects the global influence of the Roam ecosystem and its popularity.
Why is the Roam project so popular?
Roam (formerly MetaBlox) is itself a project in the DeWi track and has been deeply engaged in this track since 2021. As the only Web3 IDP project among the 15 enterprise alliances in the WBA OpenRoaming™ program, it aims to address the pain points encountered by the organization in promoting the OpenRoaming™ program globally, including lack of widespread participation, cost and profitability issues, limited coverage, high equipment compatibility requirements, and low access rates.
For users who are unfamiliar with OpenRoaming™, this plan is an open wireless network standard designed to simplify the automatic connection experience of global Wi-Fi networks, allowing users to connect seamlessly without entering passwords through authenticated identities. It ensures smooth and secure access across multiple Wi-Fi networks by realizing interoperability among devices, network providers, and user identities.
From Roam itself, it is a Wireless driven by DePIN, establishing a Web3 protocol layer in the Wi-Fi network, OpenRoaming, and among users. This protocol layer not only supports enterprise users or individual users with network capabilities (bandwidth capabilities or Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities) to join OpenRoaming through Roam routing devices or mobile devices, becoming distributed nodes, but also provides free services for users with Wi-Fi network needs while earning token incentive income from the Roam network to drive growth.
Become a Roam node, explore new profit models, and dilute network costs.
For enterprise users and individual users, they can share and fully utilize network resources in the form of Wi-Fi through Roam's hardware devices. The Roam network itself is a distributed system that allows all device holders to access the network and become nodes. Everyone can explore new profit models and the urgent need to dilute network costs based on this. At the same time, the network thus has good scalability from the bottom up.
Taking its latest Rainier MAX60 router device as an example, this device has a low entry threshold for small and medium-sized enterprises and individual users. The device integrates Wi-Fi 6 high-speed transmission technology, providing network speeds of up to 9.6 Gbps, capable of simultaneously connecting over 200 devices, achieving seamless sharing in multi-user environments, and featuring an advanced low-power design with 2TB of expandable storage. It also uniquely supports DApp applications, enabling decentralized applications like CDN, network storage, VPN, and AI. Users can easily share router nodes on the Roam network, enhancing coverage and reception range, and enjoying a smooth and efficient network connection experience. It can serve as a hub for edge computing and connectivity for many households and small businesses, providing efficient and secure support for large-scale data transmission.
In terms of mining, activating the Roam Rainier MAX60 miner for the first time can earn 3000 Roam Points. The router produces a fixed output of 60 Roam Points daily, and daily check-ins can also earn an additional 5 Roam Points. With the Roam TGE, users can exchange points for ROAM tokens. In fact, during the ABS 2024 Asia Blockchain Summit, Roam had already airdropped a total of 20 million ROAM tokens to users who purchased various Roam miners before TGE and early MetaBlox NFT holders to reward their contributions to the early network ecosystem construction of the project. This may have raised users' expectations for becoming Roam nodes.
At the same time, Roam is currently able to provide services to over 196 countries and regions, with the number of self-built nodes exceeding 980,000, becoming the largest ecosystem in terms of node scale among all DePIN projects. Good data is also expected to become the basis for the future listing of the ROAM token, which is another factor raising user expectations for the profitability of becoming Roam nodes.
Thus, the growing ecological community with potential profit expectations is making it difficult for Roam to meet demand without large-scale marketing.
Meeting users' network resource needs in a free and flexible manner.
From the perspective of users with network connection needs, in today's highly internetized environment, the internet is becoming an essential resource. Compared to the traditional paid internet usage business model, Roam is transforming internet resources from paid to free, allowing users to seamlessly enjoy the services contributed by Roam's network resources in a more flexible and convenient way.
To allow users to join the network and obtain services more conveniently and flexibly, Roam has launched Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and corresponding Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Based on DID/VCs credentials, users can directly gain the ability for seamless switching on public Wi-Fi networks without repeated authentication or registration.
Users only need to use the Roam APP to easily sync configurations between devices or retrieve configuration files when switching devices, without the need to repeat complex setup processes. In this way, Roam will establish a unified, user-centric global open roaming network, seamlessly connecting different Wi-Fi networks.
Meanwhile, VC/DID, as the Web3.0 Wi-Fi credential, is at the core of the Roam ecosystem. It allows the initiation of a virtuous cycle of network construction through token incentives, controlling the deployment and expansion of globally distributed wireless access networks, generating valuable '3W' data - detailed descriptions of who is connecting, when they are connecting, and where the connections are taking place. This also provides a foundation for expanding the ecosystem into new narrative directions, including the construction of the Roam Growth product system.
Therefore, we see that providing free, flexible, and widespread Wi-Fi services not only meets a basic need but also directly addresses the pain points of traditional internet services. Users can not only join OpenRoaming Wi-Fi for free but also share their Wi-Fi networks anytime through mobile devices with hotspot functions, earning RoamPoints rewards based on their contributions during the sharing process and receiving airdrops after TGE. A series of factors have enabled the formation of a network effect in a short period, which is the key to its market popularity.
eSIM product: Seamless switching between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, significantly reducing international roaming network communication costs.
Meanwhile, Roam has launched the Roam eSIM, which can be used in 160+ countries, cleverly achieving seamless switching between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. In fact, international data roaming fees are very expensive, with pay-as-you-go charges often reaching $5-10/MB, and in extreme cases even higher, with 1GB of data potentially costing thousands of dollars. As the tourism industry and business travel continue to grow, the market demand for international data roaming services is becoming increasingly urgent.
The Roam network and its eSIM product are precisely at the forefront of demand. Thanks to the support of the Roam network, users can interact on the Roam Network and receive free data through the Roam APP, or recharge data using USDT and cash. The eSIM product has also significantly reduced the communication costs for users with international roaming network communication. The launch of the eSIM product has become a catalyst for the further growth of the Roam ecosystem. One month after the launch of the eSIM product, the ecosystem experienced explosive growth, with the user count rising from 750,000 to over a million, and currently, the Roam network has about 1.7 million registered users.
At the same time, it is not only becoming the best example of promoting the large-scale landing of Web3 but also further proving that DePIN and Web3 are not false propositions.
The next step in the development of the Roam ecosystem: launching the Roam Growth product to build a Web3 telecom data network ecosystem.
Roam does not aim to profit by selling network services like DeWi projects such as Helium and Wicrypt, but hopes to achieve profitability through the data and application layer.
In fact, in the new phase of ecosystem development, Roam has already accumulated 1.7 million registered users, representing a trusted Web3 data pool based on DID/VCs, with over 980,000 self-built nodes that provide a foundation for the operation of the data ecosystem. With a strong moat backing, the time has come for Roam to pursue its vision of building a Web3 telecom data network. The launch of Roam Growth is becoming the 'final push' for Roam to advance toward this ecological vision.
Roam Growth is the most important and critical module product in the development planning of the Roam ecosystem, aimed at creating sustainable income for network participants in the Roam Network, supporting users to collaborate with other developers, and promoting innovation and ecological construction of decentralized network applications.
From the user's perspective, the Roam Growth platform helps users transform network devices like Roam routers into powerful economic tools through automated service integration and seamless network connectivity.
For example, users can utilize Roam miners to implement CDN services, WiFi multi-mining, and other functions to obtain continuous income. It is understood that the first phase product of Roam Growth is a router purchase plan through Huma loans, where users can stake SOL to quickly obtain loans from the Huma platform for purchasing Roam's Wi-Fi hardware, thereby participating in the construction of a global decentralized Wi-Fi network and earning RoamPoints rewards.
With the further rotation of the value flywheel driven by the economy, the scale of the Roam communication network is expanding, and it is also becoming the largest Web3 telecom data pool.
Roam Telecom Data Layer
Roam is building the Roam Telecom Data Layer positioned to serve the DePIN ecosystem as a Physical L1. By deeply linking modules such as Roam Network, Roam Growth, Roam Discovery, and Roam Community, this layer further achieves incentive construction of the network, sustainable income construction for network participants, support and incubation for connectable or embedded projects, and community governance. It also connects and shares data among people, devices, assets, and AI through the existing decentralized Wi-Fi roaming network and DID+VCs verification mechanism, ensuring the security and privacy of user data, and jointly creating a cohesive and highly interactive BoT (Blockchain of Things) ecosystem.
The Roam Telecom Data Layer is providing a foundation for further development in the IoE field. IoE (Internet of Everything) is an extended concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT primarily focuses on the connection between devices, i.e., machine-to-machine communication, while IoE further encompasses comprehensive network connections between people, processes, data, and things. IoE not only drives the emergence of new business models and application scenarios, such as smart cities, smart transportation, and remote healthcare, but also promotes the digital transformation of various industries. In fact, at this stage, user data security and privacy are becoming significant hazards in the development of internet-related fields, and the IoE field also faces certain issues in interoperability and scalability.
The Roam Telecom Data Layer provides long-term support for IoE in areas such as unified standards, data support, and privacy compliance, truly achieving full-domain communication and data sharing, thereby constructing a Web3 perception network of everything interconnected.
In the long run, the Roam ecosystem is also becoming an important infrastructure in the AI field. In fact, DePIN and underlying public chains are essentially not different in data structure, which allows the Roam system to achieve high compatibility with the AI field. In the future, Roam is expected to further expand the application scenarios of intelligent IoE through cooperation with multiple AI vertical projects.
The early DeWi system is continuously reaching developmental milestones, marking Roam ecosystem's successful transformation from 0 to 1. As the narrative of the Roam ecosystem expands further, Roam is also moving toward a new development phase from 1 to 10. With products like Roam Growth and Roam Telecom Data Layer gradually reaching the market, the Roam ecosystem is becoming a crucial Web3 infrastructure in the cutting-edge technology field, which will bring a new wave of growth and explosion for the Roam ecosystem.
