Maps.me is the world’s leading offline mapping application. Over the last nine
years, Maps.me has been trusted by 140M users, with over 60M people using
Maps.me last year to navigate across 195 countries. This trusted travel companion provides turn-by-turn routing, travel guides, and detailed mapping.
It is particularly popular with millennial Europeans, with over 58% of users
from the continent and over 70% between the ages of 18-40. The average millennial spent over $4,400 in 2019 on travel and related expenses8
.
Until recently, Maps.me was an asset of the Mail.ru group, the Russian internet giant, backed by Alibaba, Tencent and Naspers. It was acquired with the
aim to monetize it via integrated financial services, with DeFi infrastructure
powered by Solana and Serum, with the net revenue of Maps.me being applied
to the benefit of the Maps token holders.
If successful in converting its userbase, Maps.me would be one of the largest
fintech applications in the world. For comparison, Robinhood (13M users9
),
Coinbase (35M users10), Revolut (12M users11) and Transferwise (6M users12)
all have significantly smaller userbases. All of DeFi, plus every centralized exchange combined, is arguably orders of magnitude smaller. As an example, the
total number of unique Ethereum addresses to ever use Uniswap was 250,000
until September 202013
.
At this time, these comparisons are mostly vacuous, given that Maps.me
1.0 is purely an offline mapping app. However, with Maps.me 2.0, we have an
opportunity to massively expand these financial opportunities to hundreds of
millions of users.
MAPS token
While there are a number of financial benefits to token holders, the MAPS token
forms the cornerstone of Maps 2.0, binding its 100M+ users. Holding the token
will turbocharge your in-app experience driving adoption of MAPS within the
user community and likely making the application more retentive. We expect
the MAPS tokens to be available to the users in-app within the next few months
Ownership and Governance of Maps.me
The Maps.me application is driven by the MAPS token holders. Each token
represents one vote and the token holders will vote on binding governance initiatives related to Maps.me.
Preliminary details on the governance model and distribution may be found
in the appendix.
Technologically, it is challenging to support a real-time mapping, payments,
and investing platform. The DeFi infrastructure and its tokens are built on
the scalable DeFi layer powered by Serum, which in turn, is built on the highthroughput Solana blockchain
