The Problem of Internet Access
When asked what some of the major concerns for developing countries are, you might be tempted to say something like “access to healthcare” or “access to free education”. Whilst both of these are true, there is a third, extremely important resource that citizens of developing countries need – access to the internet.
You might think that internet access is trivial, however much of the world suffers from on transient access to the internet, namely due to the extremely high costs of mobile data. This inconsistent access to internet leads to a significant reduction in the opportunity of affected populations and perpetuating the cycle of poverty that commonly affects developing countries.
Siglo - The Solution
Siglo - The Solution
Siglo allows users to exchange their attention and opinions for mobile connectivity through the provision of airtime top-ups with mobile operators. The Siglo system, therefore, allows transactions between stakeholders (users) and brands who wish to sponsor the activity of the users. This system is particularly appropriate for emerging markets where the vast majority of users use prepaid credit and have inconsistent access to the internet due to the costs involved.
According to Siglo – “It is estimated that the average user’s (anonymized) data is worth thousands of dollars” as such, sponsors seeking to leverage this data would be happy to provide a fair incentive in the form of Siglo tokens to the user in exchange. These tokens can then be used to purchase connectivity for their mobile devices.
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| The Pig.gi app already has over 1M users, far higher than other competitors (source) |
The Siglo ecosystem is a collection of decentralized applications that work to connect brands and sponsors with users. On the selected dApp, users will be presented with an offer for attention or participation, e.g. Answer a 5-question survey about product preferences and will be rewarded in the coins of the dApp (which are backed by Siglo tokens). Their token reward can then be exchanged for airtime for their mobile device or sent to somebody else, hence also having banking like functions.
What about the Competition?
As far as we are aware, Siglo is the only blockchain based project looking to leverage brand sponsorships to tackle internet access difficulties in developing countries. However, the project is in competition with other projects also looking to monetize the attention of its user base.
One such example is the Basic Attention Token (BAT) which instead measures the attention of users viewing ads and content within their browser and rewarding them with BAT tokens. However, Siglo looks poised to monetize far more than just attention and has a much more diverse range of options available to its users and brands, allowing a much wider data set to be built.
There are also several other projects looking to serve free internet to places with poor access, these including Google’s Project Loon and Facebook’s internet.org project. However, these projects offer limited opportunity in terms of increasing internet access and are only available in limited areas, although may become a long-term threat to Siglo, and ISPs/mobile carriers for that matter.
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| Free internet projects like Google's Project Loon may pose long-term issues to Siglo |
Benefits for everyone!
One of the major advantages of Siglo is that all four of the main stakeholders benefit from the platform: brands are connected with a relevant audience from which they can acquire useful insights and data, users become more connected than ever before, increasing their opportunities, and dApp developers and mobile carriers have an excellent way to increase their revenues.
Unlike many ICO projects which are testing an unproven idea, Siglo is operating based on robust evidence. They have already demonstrated success through the first Siglo dApp called Pig.gi which has amassed over 1.1 million users in Latin America and generated over 1 billion impressions for its brand partners and amassed a wealth of data for the same.
Our Opinion
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| Unlike other projects, Siglo has only 15% of its token supply reserved for the team (source) |
A proven business model is rare in the ICO scene and is certainly a great indicator of strength. The project has an excellent team behind it, without a wealth of experience in economics, marketing, telecommunications and business development. We think if the project can manage to garner a good amount of attention from brands and mobile carriers, then leveraging the advertising potential of these should securely establish the platform in its target regions.
In our opinion Siglo has all the key indicators for a successful project, it takes a well-established idea and puts a unique spin on it, and combines this with a strong team, proven success and huge market potential. As such, we will be awarding this project a 9.2/10 – one of our highest scores to date!
If you found this interesting, you can find out more below;
Website: https://siglo.com/
Telegram Community: https://t.me/Siglo
About me;
Bitcointalk username: jamalaezaz
Bitcointalk profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=721115
Ethereum address: 0x05CAbdFE623E127a034B19349180984E8bB051C5
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