Hivemapper wants to be a crypto Google Maps, but insider tokenomics and product delays could foil the $18 million plan

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Phil first heard of Hivemapper after the company raised $18 million in April to create an encrypted version of Google Street View. Users could purchase one of two dashcam models directly from the company, for $549 or $649. In exchange for producing map data, drivers would be rewarded with Hivemappers’ proprietary token, Honey. Phil ordered one the same month.

A 31-year-old electrician living in Ontario who asked not to use his full name, Phil said there were two reasons he bought.

I love the idea that regular Joes can join a project and possibly help build it as well, he said. It has participated in similar ventures, including the Helium decentralized wireless network, although its hotspots never arrived.

The other reason, he told Fortune, was profit. Although he was burned by helium, he knew that if Hivemapper took off and the Honey token skyrocketed, he could make a nice comeback as an early adopter.

After ordering his dashcam in the spring and being told it would ship in early summer, Phil received a series of delay notifications from Hivemapper, which plagued other dashcam buyers as well. After an early November launch with 5,500 pre-orders, CEO Ariel Seidman said Hivemapper only shipped 590 units. Only about 200 are currently online and operational, a figure reflected in the Hivemapper Explorer and confirmed by Seidman.

Hivemappers Dashcam and Dashcam S

Courtesy of Hivemapper

The Hivemappers Honey token also proved to be opaque. After paying up to $649 for a dashcam, Hivemapper users on social media questioned the true value of their rewards, which Seidman said the company was unable to comment on for ulterior purposes. legal. Users also raised doubts about Honeys’ skewed distribution structure, with 60% of the total token supply pre-mined and allocated to insiders, including employees and investors.

I took the plunge hoping to be an early adopter and went a little bit blind. It’s amazing how greed can blind you.

Phil, one of the first buyers of Hivemapper dash cams

On Discord and Reddit, early customers compare the woes of Hivemappers to those of Helium, a project that promised to offer a real-world use case for crypto users would receive tokens for setting up hotspots into their homes to create a wireless network for Internet of Things devices, but struggled to find adoption amid accusations of insider profiteering. The connection isn’t hard to make, with Helium CEO Amir Haleem participating as an investor and advisor to Hivemapper.

As with other crypto projects that promise real utility, the pervasive worry is that Hivemapper will turn out to be another heavy-hitter scheme where insiders profit and users are knocked down, a fear exacerbated by the fact that 90% pre-ordered dashcams have yet to arrive.

It all started to look fraudulent, Phil told Fortune. I took the plunge hoping to be an early adopter and went a little bit blind. It’s amazing how greed can blind you.

First setbacks

Seidman, the CEO, said such concerns couldn’t be further from the truth. He spoke to Fortune just a week after Hivemappers launched in early November, which also happened to be the day after FTX stopped client withdrawals. The exchange’s collapse sent shockwaves through the crypto ecosystem, and Hivemapper was no different: The project is built on top of the Solana blockchain, a favorite of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. , and Hivemappers’ main investor was Multicoin Capital, which would end up losing more than half of its capital to FTX.

Nonetheless, Seidman said he was confident. He previously founded the company Gigwalk, a crowdsourcing variant of TaskRabbits for quick jobs, and he believed the massive user participation model combined with crypto rewards could disrupt Google’s hold on enterprise-level imagery. street.

CEO Ariel Seidman said Hivemapper only shipped 590 units.

Courtesy of Hivemapper

As he explained, hordes of Hivemapper users would passively collect images of their daily movements, which would then be processed and sold to companies like Redfin or Zillow. Not only does Seidman claim it would be more affordable than the Google Street Views API, but the data would also be constantly refreshed. Like Helium, the platform would use a burn-and-mint structure, where tokens earned by users could be purchased by customers to spend on mapping data.

Selling 5,500 reported pre-orders in 66 countries, Hivemapper is off to a strong start (and, with high dashcam prices, massive early revenue of up to $3.5 million). At the launch, the company announced that one of its first customers would be the city of Shreveport, which purchased dash cameras for its garbage trucks and planned to use the rewards along with an additional budget of $7,000 to purchase map images to better address customer service issues. .

Seidman said Hivemapper has two other clients on board that will exclusively use the map image API. He declined to name them, but said they were two logistics companies.

As with any market, Hivemapper faces the chicken and egg hurdle where it needs enough map data to entice enterprise customers to buy the images, but it needs enough customers to make the Honey token valuable and entice users to spend hundreds of dollars on a Dash Cam. With Hivemapper facing logistical challenges in manufacturing and delivering the hardware, progress has been slow.

The price of a token

To further complicate the matter, Seidman and Hivemapper cannot comment on the value of the Honey token or how to redeem it. On the official Hivemapper Discord, moderators are removing posts about the financial nature of the token and repeatedly warning that any discussion of exchange, value, ROI, and buying/selling is not allowed. Seidman said the Hivemapper Foundation will establish an oracle to determine the price of honey, but has yet to do so.

The DEXTools price analysis platform shows some trades valuing a Honey token at around 24 cents, with limited liquidity of just under $4,000.

Hivemapper began distributing Honey to its approximately 200 mappers on November 10. The Honeys token explorer gives a first sample of what users can expect in return. In Hivemappers’ last distribution, on December 1, cover users earned between 25,000 tokens and just one, depending on how much data they collected while driving. For higher earners, it could prove lucrative if they find a buyer in the low-liquidity market.

The vast majority of transactions listed were for users who performed map editing and QA work, a task that can be done from a desktop computer or smartphone, and were typically rewarded with a tiny fraction of a token.

200

Approximate number of active mappers on Hivemapper, despite over 5,500 dashcam pre-ordersSource: Hivemapper CEO Ariel Seidman

Another criticism focused on Hivemappers’ tokenomics, with 60% of tokens pre-mined and allocated to insiders, with 20% to employees, 15% to the company itself, and 5% to the affiliated foundation in charge. of governance. Seidman said these tokens would be limited to two to three years, and future capital raised from Honey tokens was needed to scale the project. Still, it blows other crypto projects in terms of insider allocation.

Hivemapper Discord users questioned an incentive structure where almost two-thirds of the tokens would be pre-mined, as one person wrote, out of thin air, while the rest would end up being passed on to users. As it stands, four wallets hold over 99.7% of the Honey tokens.

Phil, despite the project’s setbacks, told Fortune he remains optimistic.

In early December, nearly eight months after pre-ordering his dashcam, he finally received a notification that it had shipped. Now he’s more concerned about the Honey Tokens and if the hell can actually trade them. He emailed the Hivemapper team, which has been responsive in the past.

It gives me hope that this is not another crypto shitcoin, he said.

The company responded to Phils’ email.

Unfortunately, according to the response, Hivemapper staff are not permitted to speculate on Honey’s value or discuss the listing or exchange information.

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