Sorry for the delay! Thanks for the great questions!
- Ok no problem. Here are is a screenshot this week of just our Android installs. On Android, we’re gaining almost 10k installs a day now. In a day or so, our public PlayStore listing will show that we have 500k+ installs, so we can’t fake that
Here’s screenshot of our internal message processor - over 192mm transactions so far and we do this in realtime.
- We’re capitalizing on a global trend: people’s desire to earn passive income via their mobile devices. A quick search for “rewards” or “passive income” in any app store will reveal its popularity:
This data highlights a significant opportunity. Despite our achievements, compared to the vast numbers seen in mainstream apps, we’re just getting started. The rapid growth of UpRock isn’t just promising; it’s the foundation for what we believe will become the leading rewards program globally.
Also I thought 1k personal followers was pretty good 
- Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa [2021 numbers from Google]. It also has 213 million people making it the 6th most populous country in the world and the most populous in Africa. In addition, it’s a country with 222+ million phone users [https://www.webhaptic.com/smartphone-market-in-nigeria-market-landscape-and-growth/], although smartphone users are still the minority here (*maybe stats are all a few years out of date), it’s growing incredibly quickly. Furthermore, according to this article [https://blog.ebanx.com/en/nigeria-digital-payment-methods/] mobile money accounts for 9% of Nigeria’s GDP. Anecdotally, Sub-Saharan Africa broadly has a booming and vibrant economy of mobile phone based payments, much of it concentrated in mobile carriers, right now, but with a huge desire for adoption of more independent systems, such as crypto.
When it comes to the perception vs reality of Nigeria as a scam country, the reality is clearly more nuanced and complex. This Wired article is a great read, and shows various cases [The Long Shadow of the ‘Nigerian Prince’ Scam | WIRED], but to quote from it “Discriminating against Nigerian users may save companies from actual fraudulent activity, but it comes at the cost of subjecting innocent users to high levels of scrutiny, often involving their personal data and financial history”. Clearly a country of several hundred million inhabitants is not peopled solely or even in majority by scammers.
Among the largest scams in history Enron, FTX and Bernie Madoff as well as grandaddy of scammers Charles Ponzi were all Americans, and yet in common parlance the United States is not considered a scam country.
Hard data for this is hard to come by, but anecdotally we believe that side-gigs (such as Fiverr and UpWork) and crypto farming are extremely popular in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular, especially when considering it’s large population.
Therefore, we will certainly keep our eyes peeled for scams in any of our accounts, but we think the best way to do this is via a robust system with minimal opportunities for scams and not via targeting based on national origin or any other factor that’s not tied to the actual data.
- With our previous company, we never stored any of your browsing data on any servers, including your password. We built an encrypted storage layer that stored browser data on the device only. We encrypted everything - even your bookmarks, cookies, and anything you downloaded by default. We also offered built-in media players that would encrypt your downloaded files on the fly for additional privacy instead of using third party apps. We used standard billing such as Google Play, so when the company was acquired there was no personal user data to sell.
We understand your concerns here though. We have to earn this trust with our actions and I’d kindly say our history demonstrates that protecting customer privacy is important to us. When we introduce this AI-driven customer service, we will take the same approach of encrypting data, anonymizing it, and only if users explicitly opt-in to wanting to store their history or AI insights, would we do so. But we know you shouldn’t take our word for it. We’ll open source as we go and conduct third party audits.
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We’re entrepreneurial at heart and we love building products that solve problems for people. It’s also crazy hard to sell a company. We were extremely lucky. Those companies were self-funded with maxed-out credit cards and loans for a very long time. Sometimes on a startup journey you never know which startup is the one that leads to the one that you dedicate most of your life to. We have never experienced this speed of customer growth before though, so we have something very special here that we will not take for granted.
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Actually, all the replies here are first discussed as a team, where we give our thoughts and then stitch them together. We’re also a lucky team that still wants to work together for over ten years now. The team photo you see is the same team that built a full-fledged Android App Store with a self-service developer portal and the first fully encrypted mobile browser with built-in VPN. We’re able to move fast as a small team because over the years, everyone on the team wore many hats. We’ve all developed our technical, marketing and product development skills. For example, Ridvan handles devops and also helps with business models, while Jen leads product designs and also works on our React web app. And we’re not even talking about how everyone is using AI tools to expand our skills and productivity even more.
So please know the whole team is reviewing and we love to answer super technicals. Ask away!
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The food is amazing! Yes of course, they’re co-founders 
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We respectfully disagree. We believe over time AI models and agents that are trained with fresh, real time data fueled by a people-powered network will be more trusted and valuable than even an open source AI model that only accesses a centralized, blackbox of censored data.
Other comments:
We also think we should start incorporating UpRock’s AI doggo agent into the customer experience early because it will take time to get right. But we believe it will fundamentally change how we interact with wallets and crypto and computers in general. It will be more human-centric, more friendly and help onboard billions. Today’s wallets are still not user-friendly. We’re constantly onboarding our friends to crypto, so we know first hand that a guided human touch helps friends and family get on board faster. That’s what Rocket will unlock
You mean this response? Introducing UpRock! DePin for AI - Share your idle internet and earn $UPT - #22 by UpRock
So training AI models is one thing and decentralizing that or even getting into the business of training AI is futile right now. You have to have ungodly amounts of money and it’s not clear you can compete with Big tech anyway. However open source models and agents still need to access real-time internet without censorship if they are going to provide real-time relevant and local results. Otherwise you see what happens when a centralized authority, like Google, inserts their ideology and blocks certain types of data that is publicly available on the internet. The data that is accessible to AI agents and models must be decentralized if you want to get an accurate picture of what’s happening in the world at any given time and ask AI for an analysis. Plus, we take the web3 approach of rewarding the data contributors and empowering them with owning their own wallet, so for these reasons, we think its appropriate to stand by this message.
Cashing out is different than spending in the network. Keep in mind our vision is to build the world’s best rewards program, which means you get more value out of your earned tokens if you spend it on deals that the platform secures. Why? Because imagine in 2 years, UpRock community is now 10 million-wallet strong. That’s collective buying power. We can negotiate better discounts and deals with brands. And we would make our token central to the ecosystem so that if you buy a deal with UPT, you would get a better price and unlock perks. We want to incentivize customers spending on deals because that provides more liquidity to the miners and buys back the token. We program in both deflationary and inflationary events for more robust tokenomics system.
Thanks for the compliments on the product design. We really appreciate that!
Thanks again for the great questions! Sorry again for the delay. The launchpad week along with Ethdenver event and all the followup meetings was time-consuming.
