Maps - White Paper
January 2021

For the most up to date information on Maps.me, visit our website

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Contents
1 Maps.me 1.0

4

2 Introducing Maps.me 2.0
2.1 A revamped maps experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.2 An embedded wallet for stress free, inexpensive and rewarding
travel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.3 Your passport to a new financial future . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.4 MAPS token . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

3 A Brief Primer on Serum and Solana

8

4 Team and Advisors

9

5 Additional Information

10

5
6
7

6 Appendix
10
6.1 Proposed Governance Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.2 Token Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

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For years, the cryptocurrency industry has been growing. Bitcoin’s market
capitalization, trading volume, transfer volume, and number of addresses haveeach doubled in the last few years. New technology has come out too: smart
contracts, sophisticated loans and yield, faster chains, and intricate on-chain
protocols.
Most of the world has watched from the outside: financial firms largely areplaying wait-and-see; Fortune 500 companies aren’t building on-chain. But eachyear, new people jump in. Just this year, Microstrategy, a publicly listed company in the US, has bought over four hundred million dollars of BTC1 , Paypal
has begun to support a few cryptocurrencies for its 300M users2 and Square allowed users to make recurring purchases of BTC from the Cash app3 . Grayscale
Bitcoin Trust’s, a public market bitcoin investing vehicle, net asset value hasgrown to over $10B4 with inflows of $1B in the last quarter5 . Facebook Diemand central bank digital currencies are rumoured to be on the horizon while
Visa recently added USDC to it’s payment network6 . The institutions may not
be flooding in, but the trickle has begun.
Despite Decentralized Finance’s (DeFi) incredible recent growth ($10b of
new capital has entered this year7 ), it hasn’t been a beneficiary of the outside
world’s inflows. No project has captured a ton of users, and none are ready tomeet the high-throughput needs of the most exciting real-world use cases.
Until now.
Maps.me has more users than any project in the crypto ecosystem, and 100
times as many users as all of DeFi combined. It is a product with many use
cases that naturally lend themselves to in-app payments, requiring no in-housesupport, and a userbase hungry for a streamlined experience. Maps.me represents a huge opportunity to bring financial freedom and inclusion to the world.
This coming month, Maps.me will be launching its native financial suite toa hundred million users, and it has built the key DeFi components on Serum.
The MAPS token is the centerpiece of the Maps.me 2.0 ecosystem. MAPS
token holders are beneficiaries of 100% of all net revenue, giving access to what
could become one of the largest fintech projects in the world. And the 100M+
1 https://www.coindesk.com/microstrategy-used-coinbase-for-massive-bitcoin-purchase2 https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2020-10-21-PayPal-Launches-New-Service-EnablingUsers-to-Buy-Hold-and-Sell-Cryptocurrency
3 https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2020/new-cash-app-feature-allows-automaticbitcoin-purchases/
4 https://grayscale.co/bitcoin-trust/
5 https://grayscale.co/insights/grayscale-q3-2020-digital-asset-investment-report/
6 https://www.fintechmagazine.com/digital-payments/visa-adds-usdc-stablecoin-networkcircle
7 https://speedtest.investoogroup.com/news/total-value-locked-in-defi-surpasses-14bn/

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users of Maps.me provide the potential for massive adoption of one of the world’s
most rewarding loyalty programs..

1

Maps.me 1.0

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 theaim 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, thetotal 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 ofmillions of users.

2

Introducing Maps.me 2.0

Maps.me 2.0 aims to be the ultimate travel companion and your passport to the
new financial system. Powering Maps.me 2.0 is the MAPS token which governs
100% of the platform’s net revenues. The MAPS token-holders using the app
8 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/30/millennials-making-travel-a-priority-more-thanprevious-generations.html
9 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/robinhood-statistics/
10 https://www.coinbase.com/about
11 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/revolut-statistics/
12 https://transferwise.com/gb/blog/annualreport2019
13 https://www.coindesk.com/uniswap-uni-distribution-growth-token-defi-strategy

4will also benefit from personalized promotions and rewards, likely driving adoption, retention and virality of MAPS within the 100M+ strong community andbeyond. Not only does Maps.me’s revenue draw from a huge natural userbase;the MAPS token’s adoption and retention do as well.

2.1

A revamped maps experience

Maps is the natural entry-point for users as they explore the world. Our users
use Maps.me before embarking on any journey, be that for navigating to theirdestination, booking a hotel to stay at, or finding a local coffee spot. Given thisexplicit expression of intent, the mapping app helps their decision making by
providing them with recommendations, reviews, guidance and promotions frombusinesses.
Mapping apps of the future, including Maps 2.0, will have much richer feature sets, seamlessly connecting with local businesses and experiences. It will
support both online and offline maps.
Our partners and advertisers are excited to participate using the tools weare building to unlock the value of our travellers and maps in a user privacypreserving way. With personalized promotions, loyalty programs, branded content directly on the map, and the ability to claim your business, Maps.me will
deeply enrich our users’ travelling experiences.
Maps are an intentful interface primed for monetization. This is true forMaps.me and also behemoths like Google Maps. Google Maps, today’s dominant mapping platform with over a billion users, is reportedly said to haverevenues exceeding $4.8B in 2020 ($3B via paid promotions14 ), growing approximately 64% year over year. If Maps.me reached the same average revenue peruser, it would make over $560 million next year from paid local promotions.
However, our users’ needs extend beyond a feature-rich maps application.

2.2

An embedded wallet for stress free, inexpensive andrewarding travel

For every dollar paid by an international traveller online, only 83 cents are paid
to the final business15 , with a number of intermediaries taking the difference.
The average cost for a simple cross-border payment (including charges from boththe sender and recipient intermediaries and the exchange rate margin) typicallyeats up 7% of the amount sent and disproportionately impacts low and middle
income users16 .
14 https://skift.com/2019/08/30/google-maps-poised-to-be-an-11-billion-business-in-4-years
15 https://blog.accessdevelopment.com/tourism-and-travel-statistics-the-ultimate-collection
16 https://voxeu.org/article/stubbornly-high-cost-remittances5Currently, the experience on Maps.me is not very different. Our users explore and decide on accommodation, adventures, and travel on Maps.me, but
are forced to make bookings on third-party platforms. The average commission
charged by these platforms for accommodation and hotel booking is approximately 25%17 . On top of that, there are exorbitant foreign exchange fees that
our users need to pay. This is the status quo, with multiple billion dollar companies built around each of these services.
And a number of these are household names. Booking.com, one of our partners, is an $80B+ company which charges a global commission rate average of
15%18 (among the lowest in the industry) for bookings. TransferWise, Western Union, Moneygram, and Xoom are all multi-billion dollar companies which
derive a large fraction of their revenues from cross-border remittances and transactions.
Our users deserve and demand better. Over 47% of the 26,000 users surveyed said that they would use financial services within the Maps.me app.
Furthermore, our users present a huge base of demand for a loyalty token
with nearly unparalleled rewards. Airline frequent flyer loyalty programs areoften the most valuable asset an airline has; Crypto.com (CRO) has built up
billions of dollars of ownership from the ability to upgrade your credit card.
MAPS gives token holders the benefit of 100% of net revenues from Maps.me;
discounts, personalized rewards, and premium features; and governance over
the whole Maps.me platform, all exposed to over 100M users.
Maps.me aims to be the ultimate travel companion for its users. Offline
maps, navigation, and points of interest only capture a fraction of a traveler’s
needs. Maps.me 2.0 has a natively integrated wallet which will allow our users
to discover, review, and book directly, creating a seamless and cheaper experience. Our users will be able to transfer money cross-border with low fees andhave multi-currency accounts. All of this is only possible because of the open,
borderless, and permissionless nature of decentralized finance.

2.3

Your passport to a new financial future

We’re all living in financial silos determined by nationality, net worth, and amyriad of other factors. The world is not flat in terms of financial options andopportunities. Through scalable DeFi, Maps.me has an opportunity to break
down the artificial barriers imposed by legacy finance systems and provide its
users with a significantly larger universe of financial opportunities.
17 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-do-otas-really-cost-hotel-steve-lowy/
18 https://partner.booking.com/en-gb/help/commission-invoices-tax/how-muchcommission-do-i-pay

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Within the Maps wallet, we plan to offer an array of investment opportunities to our users, which on traditional financial rails are expensive and exclusive.
We intend to allow our users to generate yield on their savings by directly lending it out securely to borrowers. We also plan to give our users the ability
to trade a wide plethora of assets unrestricted by geographical boundaries andtransaction size.
DeFi has an incredible property that the Maps.me ecosystem benefits greatly
from: composability. Fresh projects start with immediate access to a full-service
financial backend, and can piece together existing projects and programs likelego pieces to build tools more valuable than the sum of their parts. This allows for truly remarkable synergies within the ecosystem, whereas in traditional
industries, coordinating a joint effort between two companies typically involves
a lot more friction. In this case, any project interested in integrating or expanding Maps functionality can compose seamlessly without any permission or
coordination.
And that is the ultimate vision for Maps.me 2.0 — a platform for limitlessfinancial opportunities for hundreds of millions of people, builders, and users
alike. An important ingredient to power this vision and capture its value is theMaps token.

2.4

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 theuser 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.
100% of the net-revenues
Token holders will benefit from 100% of net-revenues that Maps.me generates.
All of the revenues after costs goes to the benefit of the holders via mechanisms
the token holders vote for.
Maps 2.0 is expected to have a few revenue streams. A subset of these include fees from the financial transactions and bookings on the platform (Booking
Holding Group had $15.07B in revenues in 201919 ), foreign exchange conversions
spreads (varying between a few basis points to 4%), advertising and partner promotion fees (Google Maps is estimated at $4.8B, growing 64% annually), andcredit card interchange fees (currently approximately 2% and 0.3% of transaction value in the US and Europe respectively20 ). It is worth pointing out that
19 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/080715/how-priceline-group-makesmoney.asp
20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange fee

7each of these revenue streams may be less than applications built on traditional
financial rails, returning the excess value to our users.
Personalized rewards and loyalty programs
As a holder of the token, you become eligible for personalized rewards andservices based on your actions and token holdings. Akin to customer loyalty
programs, the benefits of the MAPS tokens are likely to be tiered with additional
services and discounts available to users with larger holdings. The existing
userbase and service providers are already comfortable with this model: loyalty
programs and incentives form a cornerstone of a number of travel and credit
related products. Just the global airline loyalty programs alone are estimatedat $200B21 . Moreover, Starbucks, which provides rewards to app and wallet
users, attributes 40% of its total sales to the Rewards Program and has seensame store sales rise by 7%22 .
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 foundin 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.

3

A Brief Primer on Serum and Solana

The underlying technology for a mapping software, real-time payment system,
and an investing platform supporting hundreds of millions of users is non-trivial.
And Maps.me 2.0 aims to support all of these use cases. Moreover, every dollar
paid in transaction cost is a tax on the end user.
And until the emergence of Solana, with its blazingly high-throughput blockchain,
this was not possible. Solana can already support up to 50,000 transactions per
second (Visa has peak capacity 65,000 transactions per second23 ) costing $10
21 https://onemileatatime.com/investors-trade-frequent-flyer-miles/
22 https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/starbucks-winning-on-rewardsloyalty-and-data/
23 https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanettechnology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf

8per 1 million transactions. Moreover, Serum and the associated ecosystem provides a rich ecosystem of financial primitives on which such an application canfeasibly be built.
You can read more about Serum and Solana here and here.

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Team and Advisors

Alex Grebnev, CFA, Co-FounderAlex has over 16 years of investment banking (Managing Director at Merrill
Lynch, Goldman Sachs) and fintech experience. He has an MA in mathematics
from the University of Cambridge.
LinkedIn
Viktor Mangazeev, Co-Founder
Viktor is a serial technology entrepreneur. He was the CEO and co-founder of
myDFS, a daily mobile fantasy sports platform called uTrener and a white-label
app for KHL, Eastern Europe’s biggest hockey league. He also worked as CIO
for a number of large companies. Viktor studied at Moscow’s National Research
Nuclear University MEPhI.
LinkedinTina Chen, Head of Business Development
Prior to MAPS.me, Tina was the primary fixed income trader for Goldman
Sachs Asset Management in Hong Kong. She majored in hotel administrationand minored in real estate at Cornell University.
LinkedInSam Bankman-Fried, Advisor
Before founding Alameda and then FTX, Sam was a trader on Jane Street Capital’s international ETF desk. He traded a variety of ETFs, futures, currencies,and equities, and designed their automated OTC trading system. He graduatedfrom MIT with a degree in physics.
Twitter, LinkedIn
Ramnik Arora, Advisor
Ramnik leads product at FTX. He was previously a product lead for ads products at Facebook. In the past he worked at Goldman Sachs. He is an alum of
Stanford, NYU and IIT Kanpur.
Twitter, Linkedin

95Additional Information

You can find additional information at maps.me. The team can also be contacted directly at sales@maps.me.

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Appendix

6.1

Proposed Governance Model

Maps.me will include a simple governance model based on the MAPS token. 1
MAPS = 1 vote. Anyone can propose a governance action for $1,000 of MAPS
tokens. If a proposal is voted through, $1,000 of MAPS is returned to the proposer.
Governance actions can potentially include the following types of proposal:• Economics and fees
• Verifying user-submitted data
• Deciding on assets available on the platform• Token holders having governance over the content– Which places are allowed to advertise
All proposals are subject to a [3] day voting period, and any address with voting
power can vote for or against the proposal. If a majority, and at least 1bn votes
are cast for the proposal, it will be implemented after [2] days.
Voting and governance may be implemented using aggregation through Nodes.
This would be a decentralized structure through which stakers could provide additional utility to the protocol. This is only an outline and the exact procedurefor implementing the governance process will be determined at a later date.
Locked MAPS tokens will be eligible for most rewards, including yield, staking and governance.

6.2

Token Economics

The initial distribution of MAPS is as follows:10CategoryPrivate Sale
IEO and initial liquidity
Serum Community Fund
MAPS Community Fund
Liquidity & Token Growth
Ecosystem Partners
Project Builders
Technology & ProductEcosystem Growth & Marketing
Total

Tokens500,000,000
500,000,000
2,000,000,000
2,000,000,000
500,000,000
1,000,000,000
1,500,000,000
1,000,000,000
1,000,000,000
10,000,000,000%age Tokens
5%
5%
20%
20%
5%
10%
15%
10%
10%
100%

% Locked*
100%
0%
92.5%
90%
100%
100%
100%
100%
85%
90%

* Locked tokens are fully locked for the first year. They will unlock linearlyover the six years starting in December 2021.
The amounts mentioned above are estimates and may change over time.
Liquidity - MAPS is expected to be listed on Serum, FTX, BitMax andother exchanges in January 2021. Multiple top trading firms are prepared toprovide liquidity for the token.
Giving - 40% of all tokens are allocated to the MAPS and Serum communities. MAPS token holders will decide how to best develop the ecosystem using
the funds in the MAPS Community Fund.
Lockup Commitment - 90% of all tokens, including all private sale tokens, are locked up over seven years. This means that the team, partners, andinvestors are all committed to the long term success of the Maps ecosystem.
In addition, there will be a soft cap on the circulating supply of 300M MAPS
tokens for the first year.
Cross-chain token - You can find the native SPL (Solana chain) MAPS
token here and the ERC20 wrapper here.

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Unlocked* Tokens
0500,000,000
150,000,000
200,000,000
0000150,000,000
1,000,000,000