Wicrypt: Deeply exploring the undeveloped market of DePin, striving to be the "African version" of Helium

Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

In the past year, the DePin track has been a hot topic.

Recently, with related projects like Honey, Hnt, and Iotex achieving significant gains, the DePin track has once again garnered attention.

However, the current market capitalization of leading projects like HNT has approached around $700 million, significantly reducing the opportunities to capture Alpha returns.

This raises a new question for the market: In the context of the overall popularity of the DePin track, is there a lower market cap "alternative" project with greater potential that can meet the needs of Degen enthusiasts?

From this perspective, Wicrypt may be one of the qualifying alternatives.

Similar to Helium providing hardware, Wicrypt also offers physical hardware, primarily smart wireless WiFi hotspots; however, it targets a broader blue ocean market—Africa.

In this underdeveloped region, DePin has yet to achieve significant development. At the same time, the untapped virgin land may also contain greater opportunities.

Wicrypt Business Overview

Like Helium, Wicrypt focuses on decentralized wireless WiFi networks, providing token incentives to hotspot providers. It is also Africa's first blockchain-based decentralized wireless infrastructure project.

The Wicrypt team believes that due to censorship controlling internet services, the news people receive online is often extremely untrue. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the news citizens received in various countries was often filtered by local systems, leading to a growing unfamiliarity with the real world among some residents. Undoubtedly, this infringes on people's right to access fair information.

One of Wicrypt's missions is to liberate people from the "Truman Show" by allowing anyone to become a sub-retailer of an ISP (Internet Service Provider) through Wicrypt's unique infrastructure hardware, thereby establishing a global internet ecosystem.

The first stop of this ecosystem is in the underdeveloped internet infrastructure of Africa.

According to the browser provided on Wicrypt's official website, the current decentralized hotspots are densely distributed in Nigeria, Africa.

According to a report on Nigeria's wireless network market by Mobility Foresights, the Nigerian wireless market is expected to see significant growth between 2023 and 2030.

The report mentions that the most popular form of wireless network in Nigeria is Wi-Fi, due to its ease of setup and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, the setup process for Wi-Fi networks is much simpler than laying physical cables throughout an entire building, saving time and energy.

This actually reflects the general demand for Wi-Fi in underdeveloped regions of Africa.

Therefore, Wicrypt chooses to expand from Africa, experiencing the process of local internet infrastructure development from 0 to 1. Furthermore, the project has some nodes in Europe and Asia, but the density is currently not as high as in Africa.

Wicrypt's Hardware Products

Wicrypt currently offers two types of hotspot hardware for data distributors to choose from: Lynx and Spider.

LYNX is an entry-level device that can support up to 50 concurrent client connections. The network speed can reach up to 100 Mbps, with a coverage distance of about 100m, priced at around $300.

Spider is an upgraded version of LYNX. Compared to LYNX, it has a higher capacity, supporting up to 70 concurrent client connections, with a faster network speed of up to 300 Mbps and a coverage distance of about 200m, priced at around $400.

Both devices can participate in mining the project's native tokens.

Each device connected to Wicrypt generates an NFT as a representative, and the data transmitted through the device is presented in real-time on the blockchain via the Wicrypt block explorer. This block explorer also serves as a mapping system to help users know if there are Wicrypt hotspots nearby.

Token Economics

WNT is Wicrypt's native token, launched on Polygon. Its total supply is 200 million tokens, with 33 million currently in circulation. Wicrypt will gradually release tokens to participants in the Wicrypt ecosystem, investors, the community, and reserves according to the following table:

From this, we can see that 25% of the supply will be allocated for incentives, which Wicrypt will distribute to three groups:

• Network providers offering hotspots through the above two devices (50%);
• Users utilizing the hotspots (20%);
• Stakers (30%).

Due to the varying hardware and geographical locations of each hotspot provider, Wicrypt will provide incentives to these miners using the following formula:

Where:

• Hdr = final reward;
• Pv = percentage of the miner's sales compared to total Wicrypt miner sales;
• Pwv = weighted sales of the miner (the sales of each Hub multiplied by its ranking weight, location bonus, user ranking adjuster, and quality check adjuster, resulting in a cumulative weighted amount);
• Hwv = total weighted amount generated by a single miner;
• Rd = reward coefficient.

Each miner device needs to stake a certain amount of WNT to operate. Miners can choose to stake for 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months. Once you choose to stake, you cannot withdraw early until the staking period is over. The yield for 3 months is 500%, for 6 months is 1000%, and for 12 months is 3000%. This yield will also fluctuate with the increase or decrease in user numbers or network devices.

This is also the reason for the extremely low circulation of tokens in the early stages of the project.

Recent Catalysts

Recently, Wicrypt received funding of $150,000 from Microsoft and $200,000 from Google, becoming a long-term positive for the project, driving its price up by as much as 280.9% in the past 30 days.

On November 30, the official Twitter announced that to expand its influence and meet the growing user demand, Wicrypt will expand to Arbitrum in the coming days to welcome a larger user base.

At the same time, according to tweets from LPs of Polychain and borderlesscapital, and Wicrypt's China staff @OnegaVentures, Wicrypt established an operations center in Shanghai on the 30th of last month, and related business may also operate under domestic laws and regulations.

Although the specific operational methods and products are still unknown, this undoubtedly brings domestic users closer to the project.

Whether in business expansion or token economic rules, Wicrypt demonstrates strong potential, and an African version of Helium may be on the way.

Investors may want to keep a close eye on how far Wicrypt can go; let's wait and see.