I’m passing on Wingbits. The team is very strong, but they need to onboard +$3.5M to finance their network while having huge investors and team unlocks very soon. TAM seems to constrained to me for a VC investment. Would love to have the founders vision. Here is my detailed analysis.

Wingbits logo

Project

Wingbits is a DePIN project creating a decentralized physical infrastructure of flight tracking devices. People participating in the project install an ADS-B antenna at their homes, capture aircraft ADS-B signals (which contain useful data such as speed, position, etc.) and send them to Wingbits. The data is then available through the Wingbits API or an LLM for analysis. Customers consume this valuable data to optimize fleet routing, airport terminal management, asset-use tracking, etc.

Wingbits is a concrete example of how blockchain technology and token incentives can be used to improve and disrupt a Web2 business by making the network more reliable and dense. Today’s aviation industry relies on an ADS-B antenna network provided for free by people installing antennas at home. The incentives for people are bad (unless you really want to get free API access) and companies’ interests aren’t aligned with those of data providers, who are neither interested in the company’s profits nor incentivized to share quality data. Wingbits creates an alternative approach, incentivizing station owners to provide high-quality data, as they will receive more rewards for this, rewards whose value is designed to increase over time. Wingbits claims to currently have a 6K+ station network providing data in more than 120 countries.

That’s the vision. Let’s now analyze whether the mechanism design is healthy enough to do so.

Market

Modern aircraft are required to send an ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast) signal 2x per second. Such signals contain aircraft position, altitude, speed and ID. As it is an unencrypted and open signal, anyone can capture it through an antenna on the ground. Thanks to a network with global coverage, such data can be used in the following use cases: Airlines: optimize aircraft routing in real time thanks to weather conditions and actual zone traffic, competitors’ flight analysis, environmental reports, safer flights (no black holes), etc. Airports: gate optimization by predicting flight delays more precisely. Banks: check if the financed aircraft are used as stipulated in the loan contract, adjust their risk exposure by verifying real aircraft usage. Insurers: check usage-contract compliance and analysis of incidents. Economists: use aircraft traffic in real time to measure the economy’s health.

Some companies already provide this data, thanks to volunteer station owners. They still manage to build very profitable businesses by doing so, showing us how much interest there is in consuming such data. Here is an overview of 3 of these companies’ KPIs:

Metrics FlightRadar24 FlightAware Aireon
Valuation $500M (2025) ~$500M+ $760M
Revenue 40M€ (50% profit) $49.5M $100M
Business model Free public version financed by ads + paid data access (B2C + B2B) Free public version financed by ads + paid data access (B2C + B2B) EASA-certified data to critical customers
Stations 55k 45k 100% Earth coverage thanks to satellite network

The market is split into 2 segments:

  • the highly critical systems with contractual liability (contractually locked).
  • the commercial information, for non-critical use cases (listed before).

The first one provides a 100% coverage network thanks to a satellite constellation receiving the ADS-B data from anywhere on Earth. Aireon has contracts and a network nearly impossible to compete with. However, the market for such data is already saturated (that’s why Aireon’s YoY growth is about 10%). Customers here are ANSPs (Air Navigation Service Providers), and there is only a limited number of them (1 per airspace). A lot of them are already customers.

The second one addresses a bigger market (~$300M/year*), growing with use cases (FR24: 18%, Aireon: 10%). This segment is also more competitive. Multiple actors have built a network nearly for free: providers can get a Raspberry Pi and an antenna to provide data and receive a free subscription to the API of the company they are selling to. They all rely on hobbyists and it works pretty well. The fact that a DePIN project has to pay in order to create such a network can be a clear disadvantage as competitors have an acquisition cost of ~$0. The current companies improve their quality and coverage thanks to satellite data when needed.

The only advantage I see for Wingbits is that they can improve ground coverage at a minor cost compared to satellite data, by convincing people who aren’t interested in free API access with remuneration. But competitors have the cash to pay new stations too if they want to. No moat. I found no customer willing to pay for cryptographically verified data. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

* bottom-up estimation

Pain points

As with every DePIN project, the main key to success is unlocking the flywheel.

Everything relies on the ability of the team to onboard new stations, creating data good enough to drive customer demand, generating revenue that burns tokens, increasing the attractiveness to install a station and so on.

But how do you convince people to join your network?

  1. You convince new people outside of this niche market to contribute. At first, they can be crypto-native people, but the fewer the better.
  2. You convert competitors’ network station owners by having an attractive incentivization and selling them a better product vision. This is the easiest way as it doesn’t rely on market evangelization. They already are aviation data nerds. However, product and vision have to be very attractive to them as they will need to buy new hardware in order to contribute, their existing one being incompatible with Wingbits’ data authentication requirements.

Both ways rely on communication and marketing to make the project known to many and convert them. And that is where, in my opinion, their weakness is. They have low engagement on X, with a few aircraft route display posts a week. I don’t think it’s the way you make people understand the market, why the project needs them, how they can contribute and why it is interesting for them to do it. But those steps are necessary to convince people (crypto or non-crypto natives) to contribute, particularly in low-coverage areas. Those areas are necessary to differentiate from competitors.

Outstanding questions: Do they have a presence at aviation trade shows? What is their strategy to onboard data providers?

Another point: their token burn mechanism is discretionary and not programmatic, so it relies on trust. It’s a quick win to make it programmatic to improve trust in the project. Why not do it?

Team

The team they managed to build is one of their biggest assets. A lot of them have multiple exits or built strong businesses and worked in high-growth companies.

Wingbits team

CEO

Robin Wingårdh Co-founder

Multi-time entrepreneur with strong business development skills. Sold one company. Business Development Manager at Klarna.

CTO

Alex Lungu Co-founder

Technical management skills acquired throughout his career. Supported Klarna Engineering for 4+ years. Went from software engineer to an engineering management role.

Hardware

Aaron Shaw Technical lead

Serial entrepreneur. Co-founded companies going from 0 to multi-million in revenue. Strong hardware experience.

Data science

Silvano Garnerone Head of Data Science

Scaled Klarna data infrastructure by 10×. Went from Data Scientist to managing the whole Data Science team.

Growth

Yanal M. Hammouda Head of Expansion

Co-founded and sold 2 companies. Led tens of millions of $ worth of deals. Managed growth.

Sales

Jeff W. Head of Product and Commercial Strategy

Previously Director of Sales & Partnerships at ADSBexchange.com. Growth strategy and network in the market for 3+ years.

The whole team is about 20 people, from software engineers to data scientists, hardware engineers to operations and sales. A bunch of them met at Klarna, a multi-billion dollar fintech that IPO’d in 2025, with strong growth (71× on revenue between 2012 and 2025).

I have no doubt about their capacity to execute.

Token

At the heart of the flywheel is the incentive: the $WINGS token.

Here is the token allocation diagram:

I think the community share could have been bigger but this isn’t alarming to me.

However, Wingbits raised 2 rounds: $3.5M in 2024 and $5.6M in 2025 from Borderless Capital, Tribe Capital, Bullish Capital. Part of the fundraising was in token issuance: 24.5% of the total supply. Here are the terms of the investors’ deal to unlock their tokens:

Category Cliff Vesting
Investors 6 months 12 months
Team 12 months 24 months

I find the investors’ terms pretty bad for the project. The investors aren’t committed to the long-term success as they will be able to fully exit their position ~2 years after investing. Pretty short for venture capital. From my point of view, VCs must be willing to be in for a decade if needed.
Team vesting is acceptable without being very generous on long-term alignment.

Tokenomics

In DePIN projects, the token is how you incentivize providers to grow the network, and so to make the product better over time by activating the flywheel. To judge whether Wingbits’ design is healthy, I first ask what price $WINGS has to hold for the network to keep growing, then what that price implies for valuation, revenue, and sell pressure.

1 - What token price sustains network growth?

Rewards are split with a PageRank-style algorithm (location, coverage, uptime, plus bonuses). The formula is private, so I work backwards from on-chain claims: what does the median station actually earn, and what ROI does that imply? I treat a ~24- to 30-month payback as the acceptable bar.

Everything below is based on tokens that were transferred, so claimed ones only. As unclaimed rewards are invisible, the following figures can be understated.

Unique claiming wallets are a proxy for network growth, as long as stations claim regularly. Growth looks flat. About 3k wallets have claimed, versus the 6k stations the project announces. There may be a large share of stations not claiming their rewards yet.

Most wallets claimed only a few times. Among stations that claimed at least twice, here is the distribution of mean daily rewards:

The median is the right reference: if mid-tier stations are not paid enough, coverage, uptime and redundancy suffer.

Median station at $0.005

Tokens USD
Daily 194.8 $WINGS $0.97
Monthly 5,844 $WINGS $29.1
OPEX $40 / year $3.50 / mo
Profit N/A $25.6 / mo
Hardware N/A $800
Payback N/A ≈ 30 months

Note: Some stations earn a lot more (early-bird or low-altitude bonuses). Wingbits also gifts hardware in high-interest locations.

30 months is on the high side, but still acceptable. Today’s price is therefore the floor to onboard new stations and expand into low-coverage areas.

Here are some cases of token prices needed for the project to stay viable, depending on the ROI bar we set:

Target Token price vs now
Current payback (~30 months) $0.005 N/A
Payback in 24 months ~$0.006 +20%
75% of wallets pay back in ≤ 24 months ~$0.010 +100%

→ So the current price is the minimum that has to be maintained for the project to stay viable. We will use it as the reference point for the rest of the analysis.

2 - Where does that price sit in the landscape?

FDV is $50M against $480k of annualized revenue. This is about 100× FDV:revenue ratio. That is very high compared to other companies in the DePIN sector. For instance: GEODNET is currently trading at a 24× ratio and Hivemapper at ~1×.

Combined with the fact that the token is fairly priced for network growth, this means the market is financing that growth by absorbing emissions. A more acceptable 20× multiple would require $2.5M of annualized revenue (5× today). Until then, someone has to keep eating the sell flow.

→ The token price isn’t justified by Wingbits’ revenue. So the market is making an investment to allow network growth.

3 - When could Wingbits reach that revenue?

Assume revenue doubles every year from the model’s year-1 buyback run-rate ($240k, 50% of $480k annualized revenue). The $2.5M goal is reached around 2030. That is an optimistic path, but still far below the size of the aviation-data market.

4 - What’s the effort required to maintain this price for 4 years?

Outside of token speculation making the $WINGS price move, the two main levers driving the token price are:

  • Buy pressure: in this case, since data is paid in USD, I assume no organic bid besides the buyback-and-burn.
  • Sell pressure: investors and team can unlock early; station operators also need to sell some rewards to cover OPEX.

What do those pressures do to the price? Let’s model the pressures depending on behavior cases.

Huge unlocks are incoming early in the project’s life. This will naturally create sell pressure, more or less important depending on the owners’ behavior. Let’s see how it compares to the buyback:

Bull

Only stations sell. Investors and team stay for the long term.

Base

Stations plus investors/team sell $150k / month in total.

Bear

Stations plus investors/team sell $300k / month in total.

In summary:

What the market has to absorb

→ Until buyback takes over, the base case is about $150k / month of extra pressure. $5.4M over four years.

On the doubling path, buyback covers $240k + $480k + $960k = $1.68M. That leaves $3.72M for the market to buy.

Today's volume is around $1M annualized. That cannot do it. Volume has to rise (through real interest, or listings) for the mechanism to work.

Limits of the model: sell pressure is simulated without a market liquidity constraint. Base ($150k/mo) is already ~50% of current monthly volume; bear ($300k/mo) is ~100%. Dumping that each month isn't realistic. Without liquidity to absorb the flow, it lasts longer at a slower pace, moving the crossing dates on the graph to the right and increasing the amount needed to finance the network. The simulation also underestimates the buyback's impact on volume.

→ Incentive design relies on a token price that is sustained by fundamentals in 4 years. Until then, the market will have to finance the growth. Way more volume is required to allow that. Volume increase would also relaunch the stations’ growth in my opinion. I note that Wingbits would benefit from being more transparent on network growth, revenue, and roadmap, so that investors can buy into the vision.

Conclusion

The addressable market being what it is, Wingbits could manage to capture $10–20M of yearly revenue in a few years, by managing their network, developing good products and making deals. The team is skilled at making deals and the company is well-funded to do so. But the potential sell pressure early in the project that could make the token go to -90% (and thus stop the network growth) and the network financing need raise doubts about the viability of the project. That being said, the token pressure could create a good entry for a VC investment if the upside were asymmetric. I don’t think it’s the case here: the token is already priced as if Wingbits were generating $5M/year so from here, there can only be a 2× or 4× upside. I would honestly love to talk to the founders to understand their vision, approach and marketing/communication/business development strategy.

I will add that in order to write this article, I took a look at their Discord and it is really heartwarming to see people from all around the world installing stations and sharing photos of them. The Internet is magic.

NFA

Carlos