$HONEY is 30% this week, with its Coinbase listing occuring earlier this week. While most of the market has experienced a downturn, Hivemapper’s $HONEY is gaining traction, and is up over 10x over the past few months. This is interesting, because $HONEY, which has ~10% of the supply circulating, is essentially a rewards token.
There is a lot more to unpack with Hivemapper than its token price; the protocol interestingly aims to provide mapping data, by incentivizing people to install a dashcam in their vehicle. While the token is gaining traction on twitter, the protocol’s purpose is to acquire users IRL. As users drive, they earn $HONEY and provide Hivemapper with potentially high-quality map updates, and new data.
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How Hivemapper Works
Hivemapper aims to compete with incumbent mapping providers like Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc. The protocol is crowdsourcing labor from drivers who purchase and install a dashcam on their vehicle to provide data. While anyone can install a dashcam, this method of earning would make the most sense for people that already drive often, as they would be able to recoup their dashcam investment quicker.
Hivemapper’s edge over existing providers is that it can potentially provide more up-to-date maps, as there are drivers constantly providing data of the same locations. It’s pretty common to browse Google maps in your city and see restaurants that have closed, outdated decorations, and other changes.
Another competitive advantage of Hivemapper is its ability to obtain mapping data in a cheap manner compared to existing providers. This is because it outsources the job to regular people who already have to drive. On top of this, the method of payment is just the protocol’s own token, while Google, Apple, etc. have to deploy cash.
Driving isn’t the only way to contribute, there are also Map AI trainers. Map AI trainers take data harvested from dashcams and help to create an interactive map with this information. These people are also rewarded in $HONEY.
$HONEY is essentially a way to reward drivers without actually paying them in real currency, as the protocol is still growing and may not have enough revenue to do this. This approach is of course also taken by many blockchains and projects within crypto.
The long-term goal of Hivemapper would be to sell the generated map to users or businesses in some capacity; how exactly this might happen is still unknown although there are a lot of possibilities. Some of the ways Hiveampper might be able to monetize their map may not even exist yet, with innovating and changing technologies making new use cases for data.
According to the project’s docs, there are a large amount of business that are priced out of mapping service integrations due to high pricing. This could be a large market for Hivemapper to serve. Finding his is the protocol’s path to sustainability.
News:
- Trump's Stance on CBDCs: Donald Trump vows to prohibit the creation of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), citing concerns over government control and individual freedom.
- Tether's Bitcoin Acquisition: Tether increases its bitcoin holdings to 66,465 BTC, worth approximately $2.8 billion, aligning its reserves more with crypto assets.
- Pyth Network's Expansion to Blast L2: Pyth Network launches on Blast L2, offering over 400 real-time price feeds and a new source of on-chain randomness for developers.
Project Updates
- WOO X's Strategic Funding Round: Crypto exchange WOO X secures $9 million in funding to enhance liquidity and trading services, signaling growth and resilience.
- Frax Finance's Layer 2 Launch: Frax Finance gears up to introduce its layer 2 blockchain, Fraxtal, aiming to enhance its stablecoin ecosystem and DeFi offerings.
Crypto Market Update:
- Top Gainer (24H) in the top 50 mcap: Filecoin $FIL increased in price by 2.4%.
- Top Loser (24H) in the top 50 mcap: Injective $INJ is down -6.5%.
- Total crypto market cap has seen a decrease by 0.7% to stand at $1.63T.
- BTC dominance in the market is currently at 51.2%.
- Median gas price on Ethereum over the past 24 hours has been 34 gwei.
Is $HONEY Sustainable?
$HONEY functions as a reward token, and this is no secret. The protocol actually has materials promoting the creation of ‘fleets’. These are large groups of drivers all earning rewards in an organized fashion on some token split basis with the person(s) organizing the fleet. The main benefit for drivers would be that the fleet organizer would purchase the required dashcam, so that can just earn and don’t have to worry about an ROI.
An Individual earning a substantial amount of $HONEY; roughly $2.5 / mile driven
This is reminiscent of Web3 gaming guilds. These guilds essentially ‘hired’ people in developing economies who would be willing to play P2E (play to earn) games in exchange for stable pay. The guild would provide them with NFTs required to play.
One significant difference is that currently, the Hivemapper equipment required to start earning $HONEY is actually cheaper than many required NFTs once were. These NFTs were required to earn tokens in Web3 games. Axie Infinity, the leader in P2E, required 3 Axie NFTs to play, which totaled multiple $ETH at one point. Meanwhile, Hivemapper’s minimum investment to begin earning is $300.
Additionally, the dashcam required to begin earning is not a speculative vehicle is it can be in P2E games. It has a fixed and seemingly-reasonable price. The con is that this physical hardware cannot be resold nearly as easily as an NFT could. This arguably makes the Hivemapper system more sustainable than previous P2E games as people cannot as easily acquire the required materials to begin earning, and then dump rewards and initial investment shortly down the line. Investing in the dashcam is more of a commitment.
Hivemapper’s Two Dashcam Products
It’s worth noting that driving a vehicle has insurance implications, literal gas fees, potential accidents, etc. in addition to the initial purchase of a dashcam. But this might be somewhat of a mute point, as the target audience for these dashcams may be people who already want to or are otherwise required to drive around a lot for their work or lifestyle anyway.
There is a key difference between Hivemapper and P2E games; Hivemapper aims to create tangible economic output. This is different from crypto/ Web3 games that may have to artificially create scarcity and tinker with supply and demand dynamic to try and fight sell pressure.
In the real world, people work jobs or participate in the gig economy to earn a living, while their employer typically provides a service that is of value to consumers, businesses, governments, etc. This just isn’t the case with P2E games as the labor isn’t used to create a tangible product or service unaided by speculation, whether physical or digital.
However, Hivemapper’s end goal is to provide something with a very real use case. People have been using maps for centuries and few would knock their importance. Relatively recently, most of the world has begun using digital maps. Google maps, Apple maps, and Waze come to mind as common providers. Ride-share apps like Uber, Grab, etc. may have their own internal mapping system. Sometimes a discrepancy can be noticed between a rideshare apps data and a provider like Google or Apple maps.
While existing providers for the most part do a good job, there may still be a lot of room for improvement, especially with the potential of self-driving cars down the line, changing urban landscape, and other factors.
Current Hivemapper Coverage
At the end of the day, tokenomics and incentive schemes are a complicated can of worms in crypto, and many have taken a stab at introducing new ways to stop sell pressure, keep reward rates sustainable, etc. Currently, airdrops and points programs as the go-to favorite for projects planning a TGE.
It is unclear if $HONEY is sustainable; Hivemapper is in its early stages. Speculators may be able to sustain or significantly increase the token price and keep the system functioning as intended, even if the actual business model behind the protocol doesn’t make much progress.
But this can only go on for so long. In the present day, there aren’t very many (if any) examples of sustainable tokenomics for these types of protocols. Perhaps $HONEY will continue to pump; whether it has staying power is another matter. It is possible that it could perform like Helium’s $HNT, which fell from its peak in 2021 but is now seeing a significant resurgence and renewed attention.
At a fundamental level, the data that users collect needs to be valuable to people or entities. It is unclear how far along the project is on this goal, but the project can still be considered to be in its infancy. Just the fact that there is the potential for real economic output means that Hivemapper might be more sustainable than much of what is in crypto, which often relies on speculation.
THORChain has recaptured attention recently; beyond THOR price performance, the protocol provides an important service as the first to introduce native cross-chain asset swaps. In the latest podcast, our Founder, Nick Drakon, sits down with Chad Barraford, a core developer at THORChain. The two discuss Thorchain's approach to solving liquidity fragmentation in DeFi, the project’s potential growth, and the complex but efficient products and services they have made.
Why Solana?
Hivemapper has notably chosen the Solana blockchain as its home. This move was made long before the chain’s recent resurgence, both in price and onchain activity. Instead, the chain was chosen. As a DePIN project, metrics like TVL, $SOL price, trading volume, etc. may matter much less to Hivemapper than DeFi projects which may heavily depend on liquidity, activity, or incentives of a given chain.
While the choice of chain ideally shouldn’t matter much for a project aiming to employ noncrypto natives, the reality is that this decision does carry a lot of weight still. Hivemapper chose to deploy on Solana, and in fact, Solana is home to multiple DePIN projects.
Teleport allows drivers to create their own rideshare network in a decentralized manner.
Helium incentivizes users to provide local hotspot coverage in exchange for native $HNT tokens.
Render allows users to monetize their extra GPU space. RNDR has seen a significant pump recently and is one of the top AI tokens in crypto.
(Read our Analyst Insight on Render here)and more…
According to Ariel Seidman, there were a few important things to consider when choosing a blockchain to deploy Hivemapper on:
Incredibly Low Transaction Fees; Hivemapper already takes on technical risk, geo risk, among others, and didn’t want to add expensive transactions to this list.
Ease-of-use; the chain should be easy to use for developers and not require a lot of engineering resources from Hivemapper.
Ecosystem; there are many wallets, tools, analytics, etc. available on Solana from the get-go while other chains are still in the process of adding some of these desirable and helpful features.
There isn’t a whole lot of data when it comes to analyzing the efforts of blockchain teams to onboard noncrypto natives. But there are a couple of examples of unexpected blockchains garnering users. What noncrypto natives value is different from what onchain users value. For example, Tron’s use in emerging economies has long been anecdotally reported on. Tron has already become a key player in countries like Argentina and Turkey when it comes to $USDT transfers.
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