MAPS Token, DeFi Ambitions, and Supply

MAPS and DeFi

DeFi has recorded extraordinary performance in 2020, with huge increases in userbase, product scope, token performance, and adoption. But the main headwinds remain: usability, scalability, and mass adoption. How can we achieve true global DeFi adoption?

Our answer: integrating Maps.me’s 140 million users with decentralized financial services.

Maps.me is the world’s leading offline mapping and navigation app. With nine years of history, 140 million lifetime downloads, and stellar ratings, Maps.me is beloved globally. The Maps.me community uses our app to download offline maps to guide their travels, whether they are professional long-distance cyclers, pilots seeking to entertain their passengers mid-flight, or National Geographic photographers venturing into the unknown.

Maps.me has clearly proven its power and its reliability. Our next ambition is to empower our massive userbase with a new and innovative DeFi platform — a userbase larger than most fintech platforms.

How will we do this? By introducing an embedded digital wallet, with the key DeFi components built on the Serum DEX and Solana blockchain, through our next app iteration, Maps.me 2.0.

Maps.me’s wallet will provide users the ability to earn passive income on fiat deposits, convert across currencies at the best rates, pay in real-time, and transfer funds cross-border at near-zero fees. Down the road, Maps.me will also offer the ability to trade a plethora of assets, unrestricted by product size and geography.

The open, borderless, and permissionless nature of DeFi makes possible certain powerful features of our wallet. The Oxygen Protocol will operate as a financial backend to the Maps.me wallet, bringing yield generation and other investment opportunities to users. That means those features also leverage the fully decentralized financial infrastructure of Serum and Solana.

We chose to build our DeFi infrastructure on Serum and Solana blockchain because of their blazing fast transaction speeds and throughput, which are necessary for supporting a real-time payments and investing platform for a massive userbase like ours.

To put this into perspective, systems like Visa can process up to 65,000 Transactions Per Second, while Solana currently handles around 50,000 TPS with plans to achieve another factor of 10. Our project became feasible because of the emergence of Solana.

Moreover, Serum brings with it a rich ecosystem of financial primitives to build upon. DeFi’s key property of composability means that projects that are interested in integrating with and expanding on Maps.me’s functionality can go ahead seamlessly and without permission. In this ecosystem, they can build on top of one another like lego pieces and achieve synergies that will transform the future of travel and financial access.

This is the beginning of a long road towards mass adoption of a different kind of financial system — and we are excited to be leading the way.

MAPS Supply

Some investors have noticed that 90% of all MAPS tokens are locked up for the long-term — specifically, for seven years, with tokens unlocking linearly starting at the end of the first year and ending with 100% of tokens being unlocked at the end of the seventh year. We chose this structure so that core players, including our partners and investors, are truly dedicated and passionate about growing our ecosystem.

We received extremely constructive feedback about our initial circulating supply, for which we are thankful! Taking your feedback into account, we are excited to announce the MAPS token’s structure and our further commitments to Maps.me’s long-term success.

For the entire first year, there will be no seed sales unlocked, with 90% of all tokens locked and no motivated net sellers. The circulating supply for the first year is 300m tokens (6m for IEO’s, auctions, etc., approx. 144m for liquidity, and approx. 150m for the ecosystem). Our long-term commitment to the community has led us to provide additional reassurances: in addition to IEO’s, the remaining circulating supply is exclusively for (1) liquidity (AMMs, DEXes, CEXes, etc.) to ensure fair and efficient trading and (2) Maps.me and its community ecosystem rewards (including airdrops, staking, farming, grants, in-app purchases, and much more). After the IEO, the team will not sell circulating tokens below the IEO price, and there will be circulating supply reductions from buy and burns using Maps.me’s net revenues.

This matters to us because we are passionate about building the financial infrastructure of the future and moving the world towards a more empowered way of travel. We are committed to making the MAPS token, and by extension the Solana ecosystem, a resounding success. We’ve ensured that the initial conditions for MAPS support its growth as well as the growth of a determined, decentralized community, and we want to thank you again for your positive and constructive feedback.

Our journey with Maps.me 2.0 is only getting started. Welcome aboard.