Having a rant

First posted on https://www.publish0x.com/?a=46dBr8Dod7

Good morning/evening
 
So today I would like your opinion on a project I invested in 2 long years ago.
 
 
WeatherXM
 
I had really high hopes for this one, I even thought it had a use case but now I am not even sure we will get to mainet. Back in December 2021 I saw this project and thought it sounded great. These were the days when Helium was performing well but our thoughts were 'if only Europe had been able to get those miners sooner' 'if only the 8 week delivery time really had been 8 weeks and not 12/14' so with our WeatherXM miner we were early. The site went live to buy the stations in April 2022, we ordered one and by September it had arrived and was correctly mounted on our roof.
 
 

The WeatherXM Network is a community-powered weather network that rewards weather station owners and provides accurate, hyper-local weather data to Web2 and Web3 enterprises.

We are part of the DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) movement, that leverages Web3 to build and maintain infrastructure in the physical world.
Our mission at WeatherXM, is to collect high quality, hyperlocal weather data for every corner of the world and make it universally accessible and useful.
 
There is an app where you can see the humidity, the temperature and wind speed and the amount of tokens you have received. It was all working well, our internet is pretty good so rewards were consistent (we do have power cuts, with no notice if there is work being done or storms but that can't be helped and sometimes it is just 10 minutes!)
 
 
The WeatherXM was on the Polygon Mumbai testnet, iit worked well and we could see our token balance with ease. (Testnet tokens) Then on Feb 21st 2024 there was an update and we moved to Arbitrum. Moving to Arbitrum was fine but the update seemed to throw a lot of stations offline, including ours. So after the usual ask in discord we had to open a ticket and as so many people had the same issue at the same time support was busy to say the least. It took 30 emails to resolve as we were told take a picture, take it off the roof (had to wait for the snow to melt), change the batteries, it's not that, let the solar panel discharge for a few days, it's not that either and so on and so forth until it was decided we needed a new part. (Every day it is offline in testnet we lose rewards but more on that later) Where is the part coming from I asked, as if it was China it would take about 6 weeks. We are rural and only get regular post once per week so we offered to pay for a courier if the part was in Europe. Eventually we got the new part and it has been working OK since then, but that was a whole month offline.
Customer serviceThe only question now in Discord
WEN
When is mainet, firstly we were told it would be September 2023, then it was Q4 2023, then January 2024, then February 2024 now all we have is this from ETH Denver This is Nic (WXM community manager) talking to Manoos (WXM )
Nic asks Manos when mainet? and manos replies 'technically we are ready', and Nic asks 'can you tell me why we are waiting' Manos says 'no but there are reasons why we are waiting, everything is set from a CEX point of view, technically speaking we are ready to go to mainet but there are some important reasons why we have to delay it which I can't disclose, we see what is happening in the crypto market in general and we think it is better to delay'. 
Perhaps we have to wait until the next bear market!
 
 
The WeatherXM team have announced that they are having a new round of funding but I know of many chains and projects that still have funding rounds when they are on mainet. I have no idea but feel free to let me know if you know of any reasons why a project won't go to mainet even though they say they are ready!
 
There are also commercial WXM stations being sent out and a few new people still buying weather stations, but the community that have been with the project for a long time are starting to get annoyed now. We can dual mine Fry tokens with the WXM station, perhaps we should have got a license to mine Fry!
Facebook post.
 
BETA TESTER REWARDS
The airdrop the beta testers are expecting has now been changed to beta tester rewards and will be drip fed to us daily over 12-14months as long as we have no 'down' days. That is fine if there are no technical malfunctions like before, when lots of people had the same issue at the same time and it took a month to resolve. 
This is the formula for our beta rewards from the WeatherXM website.
 

1. We will run the latest reward algorithm (the one that will be used on token launch) on all data sent to the network during the beta phase.
2. We will identify the number of valid station-days per station.
3. Then we will calculate the total number of station-days:
4. valid station-days of station1 + valid station-days of station2 + valid station-days of station3 + …
5. Finally, we calculate R, the reward per station-day, by dividing the 3 million tokens by the total number of valid station-days.
6. (For example, if we have 600,000 valid station-days, then station-day Reward = 3,000,000:600,000 = 5 $WXM)

 
I do hate to have a rant but it is just so frustrating, the constant postponing of mainet, the community is falling apart and I have no clue if this project will go anywhere. Do you think it is better to launch during a bull market, while there is some DePin type of narrative or wait? I see pro's and con's with both to be fair. The token price at launch could just crash if there is a lot of sell pressure (presumably that is why our beta rewards are being drip fed to us daily, so to prevent an initial sell off of tokens) or if you launch in a bear market the token can hover around it's bottom and at some point it could go up but the DePin narrative could be well and truly over by then.
 
Oh well, this one is well and truly on me, I liked this project and wanted to invest in the miner, so for now I will just have to suck it up and wait...............
 
As always, thank you for reading and please feel free to comment, perhaps I am just being impatient so I would love your opinion.