Recently, the development of the DeWi track project Roam ecosystem has been continuously highlighted, with the number of self-built nodes recently surpassing 980,000, making it the largest DePIN project in terms of node scale. At the same time, just one month after the launch of its eSIM product, the ecosystem has seen explosive growth in users, increasing from 750,000 to over a million. As Roam's popularity continues to rise, "fake miners" claiming to be associated with Roam have also appeared in the market.
Roam's "fake miners" controversy
Not long ago, Twitter KOL @SEFATUBA3 revealed that many users encountered scammers when purchasing miners on Roam's Discord. These scammers impersonated Roam Foundation employees in the Discord group and guided users interested in buying miners to purchase their counterfeit devices, which were mostly sold to South Korea and Taiwan. They also advised users looking to buy miners to only trust official channels like https://weroam.xyz/ or the official Twitter @weRoamxyz.
It is reported that several miners currently on sale from Roam, including the latest AC device Rainier MAX60 router and AP device Baker MAX30, are nearly impossible to obtain, while fake miners can sell thousands of units in a single day, indicating their high demand.
In fact, during an event held in South Korea on December 3, it was promoted as being related to the Roam Foundation and involved companies from Taiwan and South Korea, claiming to be Asian manufacturers and distributors. Although the event was packed due to its association with Roam, the Roam Foundation quickly clarified that its employees did not participate in or have knowledge of the event's content. Additionally, 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 flooding the market.
Furthermore, the Roam Foundation provided additional clarification, stating that it has no partnership with Amazon, and the Amazon Point Coin project introduced at the South Korean event is unrelated to the Roam Foundation, with the official website being the only channel for miner sales. The Taiwanese company claiming to manufacture and distribute "Roam mining" equipment is also not legitimate; Roam's official products are limited to Roam OG Miner, MAX60, and MAX30 devices, and the foundation strictly manages the manufacturing and distribution of Roam devices globally.
Thus, the truth behind the fake miner incident is becoming clearer, and it also highlights the global influence and popularity of the Roam ecosystem.
Why is the Roam project so popular?
Roam (formerly MetaBlox) is a project in the DeWi track and has been deeply engaged in this field since 2021. As the only Web3 IDP project among the 15 corporate 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 device compatibility requirements, and low access rates.
For users unfamiliar with OpenRoaming™, the program is an open wireless network standard designed to simplify the automatic connection experience of Wi-Fi networks worldwide, allowing users to connect seamlessly without entering passwords through authenticated identities. It ensures smooth and secure access across multiple Wi-Fi networks by enabling interoperability between devices, network providers, and user identities.
From Roam's perspective, it is a Wireless driven by DePIN, establishing a Web3 protocol layer among Wi-Fi networks, OpenRoaming, and users. This protocol layer not only supports enterprise users or individuals with network capabilities (bandwidth or Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities) but also allows them to join OpenRoaming as distributed nodes through Roam routing devices or mobile devices, providing free services to users with Wi-Fi network needs while earning token incentives from the Roam network to drive growth.
Becoming a Roam node allows exploration of new profit models and dilution of network costs.
For enterprise 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, as a distributed system, allows all device holders to access the network and become nodes, enabling everyone to explore new profit models and meet the urgent need to dilute network costs. Consequently, the network also possesses good scalability from the bottom up.
Taking its latest Rainier MAX60 router 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 connecting over 200 devices simultaneously, achieving seamless sharing in multi-user environments, employing advanced low-power design, and featuring 2TB of expandable storage. It also 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 while providing and enjoying a smooth and efficient network connection experience. It can serve as an edge computing and connectivity hub 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 3,000 Roam Points, with the router generating a fixed output of 60 Roam Points daily. Daily check-ins can also earn an additional 5 Roam Points, and with the Roam TGE, users can exchange points for ROAM tokens. In fact, during the ABS 2024 Asia Blockchain Summit, Roam has already airdropped a total of 20 million ROAM tokens to users who purchased various Roam miners before the TGE and early MetaBlox NFT holders, rewarding them for their contributions to the early network ecosystem of the project, which may have raised user expectations for becoming Roam nodes.
At the same time, Roam currently provides services to over 196 countries and regions, with the number of self-built nodes exceeding 980,000, making it the largest ecosystem among all DePIN projects in terms of node scale. This positive data is also expected to serve as a basis for the future listing of ROAM tokens, which is another factor that raises user expectations for the returns of becoming Roam nodes.
Thus, the growing ecosystem with potential profit expectations is making it difficult to obtain Roam devices without large-scale marketing.
Meeting users' network resource needs in a free and flexible manner
From the perspective of users with network connectivity needs, in today's highly internet-driven world, the internet is becoming an essential resource. Compared to traditional paid internet usage business models, Roam is transforming internet resources from paid to free, allowing users to seamlessly enjoy services contributed by the Roam network in a more flexible and convenient manner.
To make it easier and more flexible for users to join the network and obtain services, Roam has launched Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and corresponding Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Based on DID/VCs credentials, users can gain seamless switching capabilities in public Wi-Fi networks without repeated authentication or registration.
Users can easily synchronize configurations between devices through the Roam APP or retrieve configuration files when changing devices without going through a complex setup process again. Through this approach, Roam is establishing a unified, user-centric global Wi-Fi open roaming network that connects different Wi-Fi networks seamlessly.
At the same time, VC/DID, as Web3.0 Wi-Fi credentials, is at the core of the Roam ecosystem, allowing for a virtuous cycle of network construction driven by token incentives, controlling the deployment and expansion of globally distributed wireless access networks, and generating valuable "3W" data - detailing who is connecting, when they connect, and where the connection occurs. This also expands the narrative direction for the ecosystem, providing a foundation for building the Roam Growth product system.
Thus, we see that providing Wi-Fi services for free, flexibly, and widely not only meets essential needs 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 at any time using mobile devices with hotspot capabilities, earning RoamPoints rewards based on their contributions during the sharing process, and receiving airdrops after the TGE. A series of factors have enabled the formation of a network effect in a short period, which is key to its popularity in the market.
eSIM product: Seamless switching between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, significantly reducing international roaming communication costs
At the same time, Roam has launched the Roam eSIM, which can be used in over 160 countries, cleverly achieving seamless switching between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. In fact, international data roaming fees are extremely high, often reaching $5-10 per MB, and in extreme cases, even higher, with 1GB of data potentially costing thousands of dollars. As the tourism and business travel industries 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 this demand. Thanks to the support of the Roam network, users can interact within the Roam Network to receive free data through the Roam APP or recharge data using USDT and cash. The eSIM product has also significantly reduced communication costs for users with international roaming network communication needs. The launch of the eSIM product has become a catalyst for the further expansion of the Roam ecosystem, and just one month after its launch, the ecosystem has seen explosive growth in users, increasing from 750,000 to over a million, with approximately 1.7 million registered users on the Roam network.
At the same time, it is not only becoming the best example of driving the large-scale implementation of Web3 but also further proving that DePIN, Web3, and similar concepts 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 is not a DeWi project like Helium or Wicrypt that profits by selling network services; rather, it aims to achieve profitability through data and application layers.
In fact, in this new stage of ecological development, Roam has already accumulated 1.7 million registered users, representing a trustworthy Web3 data pool based on DID/VCs, with over 980,000 self-built nodes capable of supporting the operation of the data ecosystem. Backed by a strong moat, the timing for Roam to build a Web3 telecom data network ecosystem has matured. The launch of Roam Growth is becoming the "final push" for Roam to move towards its ecological vision.
Roam Growth is the most important and critical module product in the development plan 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, such as Roam routers, into powerful economic tools through automated service integration and seamless network connectivity.
For example, users can utilize Roam miners to achieve CDN services, Wi-Fi mining, and other functions to earn continuous income. It is understood that the first phase of Roam Growth's product is a router purchase plan through Huma loans, allowing users to stake SOL to quickly obtain loans from the Huma platform for purchasing Roam's Wi-Fi hardware devices, thereby participating in the construction of a global decentralized Wi-Fi network and earning RoamPoints rewards.
As the value flywheel driven by economics continues to turn, the scale of the Roam communication network is further expanding, and it is 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 realizes the incentive construction of the network, the continuous income generation for network participants, support and incubation for connectable or embedded projects, and community governance. Through the existing decentralized Wi-Fi roaming network and DID+VCs authentication mechanism, it connects and shares data among people, devices, assets, and AI while ensuring user data security and privacy, collectively 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 expanded concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). While IoT mainly focuses on the connections between devices, i.e., machine-to-machine communication, 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 telemedicine, but also promotes the digital transformation of various industries. In fact, user data security and privacy are becoming significant concerns in internet-related fields, and there are also certain issues regarding interoperability and scalability in the IoE field.
The Roam Telecom Data Layer provides long-term support for IoE in areas such as unified standards, data support, and privacy compliance, achieving true global communication and data sharing, thereby constructing a Web3 perceptual network of everything.
In the long run, the Roam ecosystem is also becoming an important infrastructure in the AI field. In fact, DePIN and underlying public chains essentially have no differences 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 collaborations with multiple AI vertical projects.
The early DeWi system is continuously reaching developmental milestones, marking Roam's successful transformation from 0 to 1. As the narrative of the Roam ecosystem further expands, Roam is also stepping into a new development stage from 1 to 10. With the gradual market introduction of products like Roam Growth and Roam Telecom Data Layer, the Roam ecosystem is becoming a crucial Web3 infrastructure in the cutting-edge technology field, which will bring a new round of growth and explosion for the Roam ecosystem.