"Looking at the tip of the iceberg, the incident of the fake mining machines precisely illustrates the global influence and the heat of the Roam ecosystem."

Recently, the development of the DeWi track project Roam ecosystem has been constantly ushering in highlights. Recently, the number of self-built nodes of the project has exceeded 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 growth of ecosystem users has been explosive, with the number of users increasing from 750,000 to one million. With the continuous fermentation of the heat of Roam, "fake mining machines" bearing the Roam banner have also appeared in the recent market.

The "Fake Mining Machine" Storm of Roam

Recently, Twitter KOL @SEFATUBA3 tweeted that many users have encountered scammers when purchasing mining machines on Roam's Discord. These scammers impersonated Roam Foundation members in Roam's Discord group and guided users with the intention to purchase mining machines to buy their counterfeit mining machines, and these fake mining machines were mostly sold to South Korea and Taiwan. At the same time, he also reminded users who want to purchase mining machines to be sure to recognize the official channels https://weroam.xyz/, or the official Twitter @weRoamxyz.

It is reported that at the current stage, the several mining machines on sale by Roam, including the latest AC device Rainier MAX60 router and AP device Baker MAX30, are basically in short supply, and the fake mining machines can sell thousands of units a day, which shows the hot demand.

In fact, on December 3, an event held in South Korea was promoted to be related to the Roam Foundation, involving a company from Taiwan and a South Korean company, claiming to be an Asian manufacturer and distributor respectively. Although the event was full due to its connection with Roam, the Roam Foundation immediately clarified that its employees did not participate in the event and did not understand the content of the event. In addition, the individual introduced as a Roam Foundation employee at the event has no affiliation with the Foundation. These impersonators of Roam Foundation employees, distributors, and manufacturers may be the source of the fake mining machines flowing into the market.

Furthermore, the Roam Foundation has made further clarifications. The Roam Foundation has no cooperation with Amazon, the Amazon Point Coin project introduced at the Korean event is unrelated to the Roam Foundation, and the official website is the only channel for mining machine sales. At the same time, the claim by the Taiwan company that it is manufacturing and distributing "Roam mining" equipment is also not true, and Roam's official products are limited to Roam OG Miner, MAX60 and MAX30 devices, and the manufacturing and distribution of Roam devices are always strictly managed globally.

So the truth of the fake mining machine incident is becoming clearer, and the incident of the fake mining machines also precisely illustrates the global influence and the heat 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 cultivating in this track since 2021. As the only Web3 IDP project member among the 15 enterprise alliances of the WBA OpenRoaming™ program, it aims to solve the pain points encountered by the organization in promoting the OpenRoaming™ program globally, including lack of widespread participation, cost and profitability, limited coverage, high device compatibility requirements, and low access rate.

For users who are not familiar with OpenRoaming™, the program is an open wireless network standard that aims to simplify the automatic connection experience of global Wi-Fi networks, allowing users to connect seamlessly through authenticated identities without entering passwords. It ensures smooth and secure access across multiple Wi-Fi networks by realizing the interoperability of devices, network providers and user identities.

From the perspective of Roam itself, it is a Wireless driven by DePIN, and it has established a Web3 protocol layer in Wi-Fi networks, 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 as distributed nodes through Roam routers or mobile devices, and provide free services to users with Wi-Fi network needs, but also obtain token incentive income from the Roam network to drive growth.

Becoming a Roam Node, Exploring New Profit Models, and Diluting Network Costs

For enterprise users and individual users, they can share network resources in the form of Wi-Fi and fully utilize them through Roam's hardware devices. The Roam network itself, as a distributed system, allows all device holders to access the network and become nodes, and everyone can explore new profit models and the urgent need to dilute network costs based on this. At the same time, the network also has good scalability from the bottom up.

Taking its latest Rainier MAX60 router device as an example, this device has a relatively low entry threshold for small and medium-sized enterprises and individual users. The device integrates Wi-Fi 6 high-speed transmission technology, providing a network speed of up to 9.6 Gbps, can simultaneously connect more than 200 devices, realize seamless sharing in a multi-user environment, adopts advanced low-power design and has 2TB expansion storage, and is the first to support DApp applications, which can run decentralized applications such as CDN, network storage, VPN, and AI. As users can easily share the router node on the Roam network, enhance coverage and reception range, and provide and enjoy a smooth and efficient network connection experience. It can serve as the edge computing and connectivity center for many homes and small businesses, providing efficient and secure support for large-scale data transmission.

In terms of mining, the first activation of the Roam Rainier MAX60 mining machine can obtain 3,000 Roam Points, the router produces 60 Roam Points per day, and an additional 5 Roam Points can be obtained by checking in daily. With the Roam TGE, users can exchange the points for ROAM tokens. In fact, Roam has already airdropped a total of 20 million ROAM tokens to early Roam mining machine purchasers and pre-MetaBlox NFT holders during the ABS 2024 Asia Blockchain Summit, which may have raised users' expectations for becoming Roam nodes.

At the same time, Roam is currently able to provide services for more than 196 countries and regions, with self-built nodes exceeding 980,000, making it the DePIN project with the largest ecosystem node scale. The good data is also expected to become the basis for the future listing of the ROAM token.

So the constantly growing profit expectations and the expanding ecosystem community are making Roam popular even without large-scale marketing.

Providing Free and Flexible Network Resource Services to Meet User Needs

From the perspective of users with network connection needs, in the highly internetized era, the Internet is becoming an essential resource. Compared to the traditional paid use of the Internet business model, Roam is turning Internet resources from paid to free, and users can also enjoy the services contributed by the Roam network in a more flexible and convenient way.

To enable 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 obtain seamless switching capabilities in public Wi-Fi networks without repeated authentication and registration.

Users only need to easily synchronize configurations between devices or re-obtain configuration files when changing devices through the Roam APP, without the need to go through a complex setup process. In this way, Roam has established a unified, user-centric global open roaming Wi-Fi network, seamlessly connecting different Wi-Fi networks.

At the same time, VC/DID as the Web3.0 Wi-Fi credential is the core of the Roam ecosystem, which allows the network construction to be initiated through token incentives, controlling the deployment and expansion of the global distributed wireless access network, and generating valuable "3W" data - detailed description of who is connecting, when they are connecting, and where they are connecting, which also provides a basis for the ecosystem to expand into a new narrative direction, including the construction of the Roam Growth product system.

So we can see that the free, flexible and widespread provision of Wi-Fi services not only meets the urgent needs, but also directly hits the pain points of traditional Internet services. Users not only can join the OpenRoaming Wi-Fi for free, but also can share their Wi-Fi network at any time through mobile devices with hotspot function, and receive Roam Points rewards based on their contribution during the network sharing process, and receive airdrops after the TGE. A series of factors make it able to form a network effect in the short term and be widely welcomed by the market.

eSlM Product: Seamless Switching Between Wi-Fi and Cellular Networks, Significantly Reducing International Roaming Communication Costs

At the same time, Roam has also launched the Roam eSlM, which can be used in 160+ countries, cleverly realizing the seamless switching between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. In fact, international data roaming fees are extremely expensive, with per-volume billing often as high as $5-10/MB, and even higher in extreme cases, where 1GB of data can cost thousands of dollars. With the continued growth of the tourism and business travel industries, the market demand for international data roaming services is becoming increasingly urgent.

Roam network and its eSlM product are precisely at the forefront of this demand, and thanks to the support of the Roam network, users can receive free traffic in the Roam APP, or top up their traffic through USDT and cash, and the eSlM product has significantly reduced the communication costs of users with international roaming network. The launch of the eSlM product has become a catalyst for the further expansion of the Roam ecosystem, and within a month of the launch of the eSIM product, the ecosystem user base has experienced explosive growth, increasing from 750,000 to over 1 million, and the current Roam network has around 1.7 million registered users.

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 and Web3 are not false propositions.

The Next Step in the Development of the Roam Ecosystem: Launching Roam Growth Products to Build a Web3 Telecom Data Network Ecosystem

Roam is not like DeWi projects such as Helium and Wicrypt that make profits by selling network services, but hopes to make profits through the data and application layer.

In fact, in the new stage of ecosystem development, Roam has already accumulated 1.7 million registered users, which represents a trustworthy Web3 data pool based on DID/VCs, and has more than 980,000 self-built nodes, which can provide a foundation for the operation of the data ecosystem. On the basis of a strong moat, the time is ripe for Roam to move towards the vision of building a Web3 telecom data network ecosystem. The launch of Roam Growth is becoming the "final push" for Roam to move towards its ecosystem vision.

Roam Growth is the most important and critical module product in Roam's ecosystem development plan, aiming to create sustainable income for Roam Network participants, supporting users to collaborate with other developers, and promoting the innovation and ecosystem building of decentralized network applications.

From the user's perspective, the Roam Growth platform, through automated service integration and seamless network connectivity, helps users transform network devices, such as Roam routers, into powerful economic tools.

For example, users can use Roam miners to realize CDN services, multi-mining of Wi-Fi, and obtain continuous income. It is understood that the first phase of Roam Growth is the router purchase plan through Huma loan, where users can pledge SOL on the Huma platform to quickly obtain loans for purchasing Roam's Wi-Fi hardware devices, and participate in the construction of the global decentralized Wi-Fi network to obtain Roam Points rewards.

As the value flywheel driven by economics continues to spin, the scale of the Roam communication network is further expanding, and it is also becoming the largest Web3 telecom data pool.

Roam Telecom Data Layer

Roam is building the Roam Telecom Data Layer, which is positioned as the Physical L1 service for the DePIN ecosystem. By deeply connecting modules such as Roam Network, Roam Growth, Roam Discovery, and Roam Community, with the data system as the core, this layer further realizes the incentive construction of the network, the continuous income construction of network participants, the support and incubation of connectable or embedded projects, and community governance. And through the existing decentralized Wi-Fi roaming network and DID+VCs identity authentication mechanism, it connects and shares data between people, devices, assets and AI, and ensures the security and privacy of user data, jointly building a cohesive and highly interactive BoT (Blockchain of Things) ecosystem.

The Roam Telecom Data Layer is providing a foundation for the further development of the IoE (Internet of Everything) field. IoE, the expansion of the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), not only drives the emergence of new business models and application scenarios, but also promotes the digital transformation of various industries. In fact, user data security and privacy are becoming a major hidden danger in the development of the Internet-related field, and IoE also has certain problems in interoperability and scalability.

The Roam Telecom Data Layer provides long-term support for IoE in terms of unified standards, data support, and privacy compliance, and truly realizes ubiquitous communication and data sharing, thereby building a Web3 perception network of everything interconnected.

In the long run, the Roam ecosystem is also becoming an important infrastructure for the AI field. In fact, DePIN and the underlying blockchain are essentially no different in data structure, which makes the Roam system highly compatible with the AI field. In the future, Roam also hopes to further expand the application scenarios of intelligent IoE through cooperation with multiple AI vertical projects.

The early DeWi system is constantly reaching development milestones, marking the successful transformation of the Roam ecosystem from 0 to 1. As the Roam ecosystem narrative expands further, Roam is also moving towards a new stage of development from 1 to 10. With the launch of products such as Roam Growth and Roam Telecom Data Layer, the Roam ecosystem is gradually becoming an essential Web3 infrastructure in the field of frontier technology, which will also bring a new round of growth and explosion for the Roam ecosystem.