Summary of WayruNetwork’s Twitter Space.

8 min readJan 2, 2023

2022 was a great year for Wayru Network and its community, lots of milestones were reached and partnerships were made. To this effect, the team held a Twitter space to recap the year for the community. CEO of Wayru, Charvel Chedraui, was available to give updates to the community about what happened in the past year.

End of the year recap

The CEO started by introducing himself, Charvel Chedraui a 35-year-old Ecuadorian and a lover of NFT. He has always been around and has been the face of the project, attending twitter spaces online and physically and also answering questions from the community.

It started with a recap from the beginning, of 2021.

The idea of Wayru was conceived by Charvel in March 2021 which led to the creation of a landing page that was launched in April, the lite paper that shows what the project is all about was released in May.

It was just the CEO then answering questions and handling all zoom meetings with those interested in his idea. He got into an accelerator as a solo founder, his goal was to find co-founders and create a team. Which he did between September and October 2021. They got selected to the Algorand Miami Accelerator in November 2021 and they got their first hire on the team in December.

Recap of 2022

In February, the project deployed the Pilot in Monte Sinai in Ecuador. There was little or no connectivity there, a dangerous and hard task but the team was able to deploy the Pilot. The Algorand Accelerator ended at the end of February and the pilot was completed in the time frame before the demo day.

In April, the NFT Collections called AirBlocks was launched. So many got into Algorand because of the AirBlocks and what Wayru is doing. A party was hosted in Miami where investors and collectors of NFTs were introduced to the project.

In May, the seed round was closed and it was a great milestone for Wayru Network. The first App prototype was launched and tested for months because security is very important and a lot of resources were spent on security.

In June, the whitelist for the presale was opened. And in July, the team hired engineers for a different part of the platform: blockchain, and backend. Presale started for Genesis devices and Hotspot Pools in August, and more than a hundred thousand dollars was realized in Asset.

The community is still small but it is a very tight and committed one. The community will be big before mainnet in 2023.

In October 2022, the deployment of Wayru Network’s physical network started in the city of Quito. Deployment of fiber cables and they have to be 5 times faster and cheaper than other networks. The plan was to cover 30 km by the end of the year and 50 km was exceeded. The testnet platform and shipping started around the same time.

The project has been building during the bear market and the fruits of the efforts will soon be visible for all to see. It has always been about building.

Wayru was part of the LaBitconf conference held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is an important blockchain event in the world and Wayru got in through the help of the Algorand foundation. Many people in Argentina got to know about Wayru and were onboarded to the community.

In December, WayruNetwork launched a referral program and it is meant to develop the community to get real organic users on the platform. And this is not to get those that are looking to get freebies and dump after. There are rules to follow:

Refer someone with your unique link.
New users join and complete the tasks.

The rules are to make sure they are real humans and not bots and to restrict those looking to game the system by creating multiple emails to redeem the rewards. Wayru has been deploying Hotspots in Quito with around 30 location partners.

Partnerships

Wayru closed a deal with a Union that helps in bank raising people in areas where normal banks do not go to. They are organizations looking to onboard as many people as possible to a digital economy. This deal will involve Wayru deploying 100 Hotspots to the city of Quito. Wayru is 25% done and will be 100% by the end of January. The idea behind the partnership is to onboard several businesses and entrepreneurs.
WayruNetwork has been selected after due diligence and months of bureaucracy as the company to provide the United Nations (help refugees branch) to give Internet connection to people in part of Ecuador for a year. This shows that Wayru can be used by large organizations to solve connectivity issues. This partnership is to empower people in Ecuador through education and workshops, it also involves Girls in Tech. Wayru Team is super excited to be a part of this.

Things to expect in 2023.

AirBlock club: It will be a platform that will have a marketplace collection and batches will be released on weekly basis to ensure all airblocks are out before the mainnet. It will have a banner and wallpaper creator to enable members to choose different backgrounds or banners, they can add the airblocks and show them off on social media.

There will also be a staking option to get tickets to different activities. The club is to give extra benefits to AirBlock owners, there will be an on-chain ticket for each airblock owned that can be used/burn to enter activities in the ecosystem Eg Raffles and other activities.

There will be auctions for the unique and extra rare airblocks. The club will be available in 45–60 days, any that holds one or more AirBlocks can connect and interact with the platforms.

Mobile Apps: The mobile apps are ready for testing: Mode operator and WiFi Apps. WiFi apps will be released before the Node operator app. It will be available to everyone on ios and Android systems in a week on Google play because it allows for a testing version. The final version will be out in mid-February for WiFi apps and in mid-March for the Node operator app in the Play store and Apple store.

These apps will allow people to find nearby Hotspots that are available for them to connect, and also for them to watch Ads on demand for WiFi credit to access the WiFi network and get online.

Private Sale: A strategic round to grow faster. The state of the market is terrible so the team is focusing on generating revenue from network usage before approaching investors. The team wants revenue to start coming from network usage as soon as possible. The main focus is on the commercial and network usage side to get many people connected as soon as possible in the next months. It is postponed and will happen later in 2023, it does not have an exact date but it will be in early Q2. The number of tokens to be sold will be reduced and directed toward the community.

What was planned to be sold on private and public sales will be reduced because the market conditions is been considered to have a healthy raise in the private round? There is no exact price for the public sales but it is expected that the initial token price will be around $0.1 and $0.2. Pump and dump are to be avoided and this is why the team will rather have people earn tokens as rewards rather than having to buy and dump them. Putting energy to earn them will increase the probability of putting them to work rather than dumping them.

The more the network grows, the more rewards are distributed. It shows the token is supported by the infrastructure. The stronger the use case, the stronger the token price.

Mainnet: Mainnet will happen 2–4 weeks after the public sale. People will then be able to claim their rewards, especially those buying pool tokens now. Everything being deployed and those to be deployed before the public sale will be able to stake tokens and start getting rewards. Those who will buy Wayru tokens on public sale and people that receive Wayru tokens as rewards will be able to stake them and start earning real rewards on the platform.

Wayru is improving the testnet based on the constant feedback from the community to get better UI and UX for the users.

Node operators & Location partners.

Node operators are those that bought the Genesis device while location partners are those that are not tech-savvy or blockchain-savvy. Location partners are business owners and entrepreneurs that need a reliable way to set up WiFi for their clients. Wayru sets it up for them for free and shares the reward with them. This will allow Wayru to grow faster without leaving out those that are not tech-savvy and not familiar with concepts of crypto tokens. They will get points instead of tokens and these can either be changed to tokens and sent to their wallets or get them redeemed in different ways that Wayru is preparing.

Wayru provides the device and shares rewards, while Node operators will maintain it. Node operators are fully responsible for their devices.

Network operators: they are entities other than ISPs (Internet Service Providers) Wayru wants to partner with. The team has been talking with ISPs from South America, Central America, North America, and Africa to expand Wayru usage. The ISPs are managed by a separate entity. They earn rewards like Hotspot operators but on a larger scale.

Rewards: There will be a document explaining about this that will be released in the coming weeks. It will include the participation of TestNet, referral system, and other activities in the community before testnets. Anybody that has been actively involved in the community will be rewarded when the mainnet arrives.

Tokenomics: It is available on the website, public for everyone to see.

Hotspot Compatibility: This involves other devices apart from Wayru Genesis devices. There will be a list of compatible devices available to the community which will be updated regularly. There will also be a voting/poll by the community to make decisions.

Multi-chain compatibility: Allowing other chains to invest in Wayru or wrapped assets, and build bridges with other chains. Algorand will still be the main chain, the involvement of other chains is to onboard many people.

The CEO then introduced the team and praised them for the great work they have been doing.