MNTD. by Rak Wireless

Direct Availability for End Customers  

The Singapore-based start-up MNTD. has set itself the goal of making the hotspots directly available to end customers instead of using distributors and thus delivering them quickly and reliably. In other words, to sell the "basic foundation" of the People's Network directly to people, instead of using long and expensive supply chains.

We have been working with MNTD. since RAK Wireless planned to launch this direct-to-consumer brand and to launch the brand internationally with the initially two new Helium Hotspots. This included the design and development of the website with an integrated Shopify store, as well as consulting around the brand and the creation of a pre-launch campaign and product video. 

Teaser Campaign

The demand for hotspot miners is high (in late 2021), but availability is scarce. The Helium community is therefore very interested in suppliers who actually have miners "in stock" and sell them at reasonable prices. To generate attention around MNTD. and the limited gold miner, blokk.studio (by Apps with love) has launched a pre-launch campaign and developed the slogans "OMGold" and "get MNTD". 

Web Shop

Our work for MNTD. included the conception, design and implementation of the website. For the e-commerce part, we relied on an integration of Shopify. From the beginning it was clear that there would be an enormous run on the miners, which are available in limited quantities, so only the most stable and proven store solution was eligible.

Behind the website with a simple interface a sophisticated architecture is hidden. As with many of the websites we have developed, Statamic is used as the content management system (CMS). Due to the expected server load, however, we do not host on just any server, but generate static pages with a Statamic addon, which are then hosted on Cloudflare. We have also automated the process for generating the static pages especially for this case. It can be triggered directly from the CMS via an additional small, specially developed Statamic addon. So far this setup has withstood every onslaught. What has not always worked great is the checkout process via Shopify. This is because the majority of the mining community is technically experienced and tries to get hold of as many miners as possible by all means (i.e. bots).

Mechanism for Bot Protection 

The numbers of the individual drops (pre-announced times at which a certain number of miners are available) show well why this protective mechanism is important. 

In the second US drop, the 8,000 miners sold out within 11 minutes. Out of 2.12 million site visits within these few minutes, 58,000 automatic access attempts (bots) were blocked. 

This protection towards bots is important on the one hand to keep the site running, on the other hand to give the "real" users a fairer chance to buy. Even more so, because MNTD. has made it a goal to make the miners available to as many people as possible and wants to prevent miners from being resold overpriced on other platforms. Despite Shopify's best efforts and the limit of two miners per buyer, not everyone got a fair chance, which can be very frustrating. Even better solutions for the future are already being worked on.

We created the MNTD. App for onboarding and setup of the MNTD. and RAK Hotspots. It allows to easily manage the Helium (HNT) balance and to monitor the token earnings. With the app you can remotely monitor your Hotspot status (of one or many Hotspots), check validator address, internet connection quality and Hotspot temperature.

More about MNTD. and the Helium Network you can read in our blogpost about this "People's Network".

Link Webseite: getmntd.com