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Update 02 February 2024: Silencio closed $1M Pre-Seed round
I'm almost surprised that nobody here at Publish0x seems to have written about Silencio yet. So I'm all the more pleased to be the first.
So, what is Silencio anyway? Siilencio is a project from the DePIN area. More on that below.
The claim on their website www.silencio.network says:
The global network to measure noise pollution
Start mining Noise Coins today with our free mobile app!
So it's all about noise pollution, or more precisely about measuring it. And in connection with this, you can collect Noise Coins (NOISE) with the associated app.
Who is behind it? The company is called Quickkonnect UG. It is a German company based in Munich, Germany.
What is it for? TL;DR: The data is collected for industries such as real estate, catering, insurance and urban planning to combat noise pollution. Silencio aims to improve the quality of life worldwide.
You can read more about this in the so-called Light Paper on the website.
Can I get rich with this?
Probably not. But hey, we wouldn't all be here if we didn't have that little demon in our heads that constantly sees opportunities in cryptospace, right? ;-)
I have a soft spot for crowdsourcing projects. I'm involved in Helium (if you know the project, you know what a gold rush it was in 2021/22). I've also reported environmental pollution or sightings of endangered species to the authorities using a suitable app. So Silencio had my attention. However, after seven years in the crypto industry, I am also, let's say, purified, and have had my fair share of good and bad experiences. So I was sceptical: a private company that wants to collect data via my smartphone microphone under the guise of doing the world a better place? Hmm.
But first, let's return to the question of whether you can get rich with Silencio. First of all: the coin is not yet traded anywhere. The roadmap also gives no indication of when this might be the case. At the moment, you are collecting nothing but points.
Is the whole thing serious?
The fact that the coin is not yet tradable is not a bad sign. It means that there has been no pre-mining and that funding is coming from other sources.
Interestingly, the Silencio founders are also involved in other companies that carry out deployments for Helium, Weather XM and PlanetWatch on a business scale, e.g. HeliHost. Not only that, but there are also associated activities in the area of data-driven platform-as-a-service solutions and software development. If you would like to find out more about this first-hand from two co-founders, you can watch the video How Much Is Your Silence Worth? | Silencio Network | DePIN State from 22 June 2023. The brothers Thomas and Theo Messerer talk about Silencio.
If it's not just a coincidence that their names are the same, then it seems to be a real family clan. Because if you do a little research, you can see here, for example, that a certain Nikolas Florian Messerer and a certain Alexander S. Messerer are also involved in the network of companies surrounding Quickkonnect and HeliHost.
Source: https://www.northdata.de/HeliHost+Beteiligungs+GmbH,+Haar/Amtsgericht+M%C3%BCnchen+HRB+267612
All of these people have been active in their business since around 2017. If you want to use the gold rush analogy again, the Messerers used to sell the shovels and sieves for gold prospecting on a wholesale scale, so to speak.
Now they have launched their own gold mine, Silencio.
This all gives me the impression that this is at least not the 385th windily organised crypto project that quickly launches a coin onto the market in order to attract money just as quickly and to make an even quicker exit. The guys apparently have a business model that pursues sustainable profitability.
There is a paper that is labelled "White Paper", "Light Paper" and "Lite Paper" on one and the same page. :-)
You can call me a spelling Nazi if you like, but I get hung up on things like that ;-)
Anyway, the paper goes into a bit more detail. After a general introduction about noise pollution, the project, the team and the roadmap are presented. In the project section, for example, scientific papers are cited in which a Silencio team member named Eoin A. King has worked on. Mr King is a member of the EU working group "Noise Expert Group (E02809)" and is presumably responsible at Silencio for ensuring that the measurements recorded with the app are transformed as scientifically correct as possible into usable - i.e. commercially usable - data.
From an investor and app user perspective, the part of the white paper entitled "Tokenomics" is certainly interesting. Silencio's tokenomics are currently quite simple, even I understand them ;-) To summarise:
Users currently receive one Noise Coin per minute of uploaded decibel readings and can earn additional Noise Coins through referrals.
From the Noise Coins generated by referrals, the referring person should receive 3 % (now it is more than 3 %, more on this later.) There is currently no limit to the number of uploaded measurements per user. A single measurement may be a maximum of 15 minutes long (no longer true, see later). You can also take short, 15-second measurements in or in front of venues and upload the measurement associated with this location. There is 20 Noise Coins for this. The tokenomics structure will be further developed to motivate users to measure noise pollution and reward their contribution to the success of the platform.
So much for tokenomics. The white paper goes on to say that a comprehensive tokenomics structure will be published and implemented in 2023. Well, 2023 has only just passed. ;-) I assume the focus of the entire team is not currently on updating the homepage and the whitepaper.
Oh, there's one more point here: As befits any crypto project that wants (or needs) to build up a large user base, Silencio also has an
Airdrop
This is called the "BETA Airdrop" and it works as follows:
All BETA users will participate in a 3% airdrop of the entire token supply once the project is launched on the blockchain.
I launched the app about a fortnight ago, so I assume that all current users can consider themselves BETA users.
Distribution of the airdrop
Each user's participation in the airdrop is primarily based on the following criteria:
1. amount of NOISE earned
2. number of hexagons covered
3. number of hexagons discovered
Ok, NOISE is earned by uploading decibel readings. What is meant by hexagons? Helium aficionados already know their way around here, everyone else can read more in depth here. In short: H3 is a geospatial indexing system that divides the world into hexagonal cells. There are different levels of resolution for different applications, ranging from very large (over 4 million km²) to very small (less than 1 m²) hexagons. Silencio therefore aims to measure the world at a very fine mesh.
H3 is open source under the Apache 2 licence and is apparently supported by Uber.
Silencio lets its users collect the decibel readings on the H13 level. An H13 hexagon has an area of 43.87 m² or around 472 ft². This means that the "diameter", if I may put it so imprecisely, of a hexagon is approx. 8 metres. You can estimate for yourself how many hexagons you cross on a walk.
As soon as a user has uploaded measurement data for a hexagon for the first time, it is considered covered.
When I started taking measurements in my town about a fortnight ago, all the hexagons had never been covered. And it still looks like I'm the only Silencio user in my neighbourhood. It's different in the centre and in a few outlying districts or streets of the nearest big city, where there are obviously already one or two "surveyors" out and about. Nevertheless, there are still many large white spots.
DePIN
This is one of the latest trends in the crypto space, and the abbreviation stands for "Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks". If you are already familiar with it, you can skip this section.
In the context of cryptocurrencies, this usually means the following: Someone wants to build and operate a fairly large-scale infrastructure network. And as you can see from the example of mobile phone companies, building any such network from scratch would cost a whole lot of money. So this initial burden is distributed among as many people as possible, nicknamed the "crowd" ;-), for whom the individual costs remain very manageable. In the case of Helium, for example, these are the people who put a miner in their living room window. The Silencio team can take advantage of the fortunate fact that its users already carry the necessary hardware around with them anyway: an internet-enabled device with a GPS module and microphone, also known as a smartphone.
In other words, the investment of a Silencio user is practically zero, apart from the time spent. And even this is almost negligible, as you can take the measurements during activities that you are doing anyway, e.g. going for a walk or being in or in front of a location.
In my opinion, the Silencio team is doing a lot of things right, so it may come as no surprise that in the State of DePIN 2023 report published by Messari on 5 January 2024, Silencio took third place in the "Nodes Added in 2023" statistics with 50,000 nodes (=users) after "WiFi Map" and "Wynd".
Development of the user base
Before I introduce the app, I would like to say a few words about the user base.
The Android version has been available in the German Play Store since 12/05/2023, the iOS version even since 15/02/2023.
In the above-mentioned video "How Much Is Your Silence Worth? | Silencio Network | DePIN State" from 22/06/2023, Theo Messerer says that they have around 10,000 users. On 4 February 2024, the app's home screen showed me 86,000 users, on 13 February 2024 92,500 users, i.e. an increase of approx. 6,500 users within 9 days.
In the second part of this series, I will introduce you to the iOS version of the app with a comprehensive screenshot gallery.
Your feedback
What do you think of the project? Are you on board? Or do you not trust the project?
I look forward to any feedback, including additions to the content or hints about errors.
In the meantime...:
If you want to install the Silencio app, you can find it for Android and iOS devices here:
Silencio in the Apple App Store | Silencio on Google Play
It would be nice if you could support me by entering my user name "Robyn" as the invitation code when you register.
Another way to support me: Start your next purchase at Amazon - no matter what you order - via this affiliate link: www.amazon.de
You will be supporting a current software project of mine that has to do with smartphones and batteries.
EDIT: 2024-02-24 Corrected "diameter" of a hexagon.