I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about a new project that has come to my attention. Is it a good project or not, let's see if we can find that out together.
What is Hivemapper?
The pitch is super easy and straightforward. You help them map the roads and you get paid for doing it. At least to me, that is about as straightforward and easy to grasp as it gets in crypto. But let us take a look at the how. The "how" in how the actual mapping will be done, is with the help of a dashcam that you will mount in your car. And it will map the roads you driving on as you drive on them.
The company actually has two different models of dashcams to choose from. One that is slightly more pricy and looks to be the premium model. And a second that looks slightly more bulkier, the "normal" model. And from the pricing, I can tell straight away that the company priced them fairly close in price that many who get them will pay that little extra to get the premium one. The normal one is priced at $549 while the premium one is priced fairly close at $649.
The only thing it doesn’t do is ever invade your privacy. It only collects what the map needs and absolutely nothing else.
The company also makes a point in that they value your privacy, and according to them nothing except data needed for mapping will be collected.
How will you get paid?
Well with crypto of course. But I assume you already figured out as much. The token in question is staying with the hive theme and is called $HONEY. The driver will get paid more for mapping new roads in the area. As shown by their example below.
That means you have an incentive for mapping every little nook and cranny of the sections your drive on. No sideroad will be left undriven and unmapped with you behind the wheel.
The $HONEY will be capped at 10 billion tokens, of those 4 billion will be allocated as rewards to those who do the mapping.
My thoughts on Hivemapper
I am actually going to start this off with my final thoughts on this project, and they are as follows: STAY THE F-K AWAY FROM HIVEMAPPER. The whole thing is looking like messy copy pasta of Helium. You know the project where you bought a hot spot and you got paid for having it in good places where people could use and access the network it provided. Only there where actually no one who used the darn thing. And by the looks of things this Hivemapper has no customers either.
If that were not bad enough. The company makes some bold claims on its site that might look great. But if you stop and think for a minute you realise that the claims actually are very stupid. This one is probably my favorite.
It looks pretty straightforward at first glans right? If the cars Google uses to map with cost $500,000 then $500M will get you 1,000 cars. And if the dashcam cost $500, rounded down which mathematically technically is correct if they only use one number as a value digit. And with that price, they have a whopping 1,000,000 cars mapping the roads. 1,000 more mapping cars compared to Google. Looks like a legit claim right?
The first thing that seems a bit strange to me is the $500M figure. I could not find where they got that from, but in all honesty, I did not look that hard. But it is completely unnecessary. Because the relation between prices is the same. You still get 1,000 more cars with dashcams than Google cars. But that's just me being nitpicky. The big elephant in the room is that when it comes to the Google car, it is Google that is paying for it. But when it comes to the dashcams it is you or me who is expected to foot the bill, and not Hivemapper.
Then we come to the $HONEY token, of which only 40% is allocated to the people who are doing the mapping. That means this project has a huge pump-and-dump potential. And that alone is a huge warning flag to me.
Is this the ambrosia of ponzies?
But maybe Hivemapper only looks like it is a bad copy pasta of Helium, but with a much higher cost of entry. Maybe they have some use cases or customers ready to ponce? Well, non that I could find. And if we use one of their own examples of New York to get a price estimate. According to them New York has 7,837,650 map credits to it. I assume that is to unlock every nook and cranny of the city. And with the price of $0.02 per map credit New York will set you back $156,753. Sure that is if you unlock the entire city. Which I assume not even a cab driver would do. It is still pretty steep to be asked to pay anything at all with Googles map being free to use. Sure Hivemappers map has the potential to be "better", they claim 24x fresher. But is that something you need or is willing to pay for? For me, that is a big no.
To me this whole project screams of someone having an idea. And then getting a ton of money to do it on the hope of people or companies willingness to use it. It is the classic Field of Dreams scenario "build it and they will come". But do they? With Helium they most certainly did not. And here will they really be able to outcompete Google and charge money for something that is only slightly better? Well, my gut tells me no. But who knows, maybe this will be the thing that enables self-driving cars, who knows.
Oh, and there is another reason this whole project is looking more or less like a copy pasta of Helium. And that is because Amir Haleem, CEO & Founder of Helium is either directly involved with the project as a partner. Or in an advisory role. But look on the bright side. Maybe Helium will have its first use case now. ^^
What is your thought on this Hivemapper project, do you agree with my assessment or is it something that sounds interesting to you? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below. If you would like to support me and the content I make, please consider following me, reading my other posts, or why not do both instead.
See you on the interwebs!
Picture provided by: https://pixabay.com/, https://hivemapper.com/, fair use
