Recently, I noticed a quite interesting phenomenon in the DePIN market. Roam, a decentralized WiFi project, has grown from 400,000 devices in July last year to 1.21 million devices currently, ranking first worldwide. This happened in just 7 months, and moreover, the project only raised $7 million compared to competitors like IoTeX or Helium. So what is roam that it has created this effect?

What exactly is Roam? It is a decentralized WiFi roaming network. The simple but clever idea: you share your home WiFi on the Roam network, and when someone connects, you earn reward points, which can be exchanged for ROAM tokens. No special equipment needed, just a regular router. That’s why the participation threshold is very low and easy to attract users.

But what is roam beyond this basic model? Roam also sells official routers - MAX30 ($199) and MAX60 ($499). Buyers of the MAX60 receive additional rewards: 60 points daily, up to 150 points when logging in. I find this quite interesting because it creates strong motivation for users. Rough calculations suggest that if the ROAM token reaches a valuation similar to IoTeX (market cap around $330 million), each token could be worth approximately $0.825. Users buying MAX60 could potentially earn about $900 over 100 days of activity.

But this is the ideal case. The reality is more complex. Roam’s device distribution is mainly concentrated in South Korea, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe — regions where the network is already developed. The demand for public WiFi in these areas is not urgent, so the main motivation currently is the expectation of a token airdrop. That’s also a weakness of this model.

I observe that what roam is, fundamentally, depends heavily on the success of its upcoming token economics. Currently, Roam has issued about 2.139 billion points to users, but the conversion rate between points and ROAM is still unclear, and the TGE timeline has not been announced. According to the latest data, ROAM is trading at $0.01, up 8.56% in 24 hours, with a circulating market cap of approximately $4.23 million.

If the airdrop effect doesn’t go well, there could be a large wave of users disconnecting. The big question is: after the airdrop, will users continue to connect devices? Can Roam find a real use case beyond token incentives? That’s the biggest challenge Roam faces. However, from a revenue perspective, Roam is the biggest winner here — if half of the devices are individual routers, revenue could reach $127 million. That means Roam has just earned huge revenue while building a significant community in just 7 months.