Ant Network: All The Reasons Why You Should Be Concerned

Ant Network is a cryptocurrency application based on a mobile application where users can mine ant coin by pushing a button once or twice a day. Unlike other game-like crypto mining apps, Ant Network creators claim that the goal of creating this coin is to establish a privacy-centered social media sharing network where both content creators and viewers can earn profit while viewing or playing video games.

However, there are many red flags about this network, such as the anonymity of creators, paid upgrades, lack of privacy policy, and system errors. In this article we explore reasons why we don’t think Ant Network is a good investment of your time or money. Before proceeding, please read our disclaimer on investment related articles.

What is Ant Network?

image 1Ant Network app

Ant Network is a cryptocurrency mining application resembling Eagle Network and Alpha Network where users click a button twice everyday and receive 48 virtual coins per day, and once they collect a 1000 coins they can withdraw the coins to the Ant Network wallet. The Ant Network Android application was launched in March 2021 and has had +50k installs until mid June 2021.

According to the Ant Network roadmap, the goal of launching the network is to create an advertising and social media sharing platform similar to YouTube. Differences between YouTube and Ant Network would be:

  • Censorship: Ant Network will be a privacy centered platform such that no censorship authority can remove the content off the platform if the creator doesn’t.
  • Middle man: In YouTube, when users view an ad within a video, Google gets 45% of the profit and the content creator gets the remaining 55%. Ant Network aims to remove the platform profit and divide the ad earnings between the content creator and the ad viewer where both will earn ant coins.

However, competing with YouTube is of course challenging due to switching costs. Majority of everyday users are unlikely to switch to a new platform when all their followers and followees are on the older platform. There are very rare cases of social networks losing their dominance and that takes generations. For example, Facebook is losing its dominance to Tiktok but that has only happened in young adults so far.

TikTok surpassing other social networks in popularity among teenagersSource: Taking Stock with Teens surveys

What are the project phases of Ant Network?

The app creators designed the mining rate to be halved when number of users reaches these numbers: 10k, 500k, 1M, 500M. Mining rate started at 4 coins/hour. In February 2021, the first halving occurred when app users reached 10k, and in May 2021, the second halving occurred, and now users earn 1 coin per hour for a 24h mining session.

According to the whitepaper,

  • In the second quarter of 2021, they will hold a private coin sale where users can buy ant coins in order to collect enough money to finance the video sharing platform project.
  • In Q4 of 2021, the team claims to establish and test the video sharing network
  • In Q1 in 2022, the team claims that they will launch the ant coin and list it on crypto exchanges.

Is Ant Network a legitimate project?

In short, we don’t think so. We see many red flags in this network, making us believe that creators do not plan on actually launching a real coin, hence, wasting time of the app users. Some of the issues related to Ant Network are:

In order to increase the mining speed within one session, users can buy packages with cryptocurrency. The mining speed will range from 2-75 coins per hour at a maximum price of $100. Paid upgrades are a big red flags when it comes to similar cryptocurrency projects because the creators are already making real money whereas the users are investing in virtual assets which may not turn into actual profits. Additionally, making the payment method through cryptocurrency makes it harder to trace the transactions and fraud if the creators decide to terminate the project and take the profits.

Anonymous creators

Although some of the creators of other legitimate projects such as Bitcoin used nicknames, almost no successful crypto project had a completely anonymous team behind it. Ant Network creators are both anonymous and state that they do not have corporate emails for people to reach out to them.

image 2source: Ant Network FAQ page

Users cannot directly reset their passwords

In the Ant Network FAQ webpage, creators clearly state that there is an error in the system which doesn’t allow users to reset their passwords, and that they should contact them via registered mail addresses to tackle the issue.

source: Ant Network FAQ page where creators state that they cannot reset user passwords due to system errors. source: Ant Network FAQ page

No privacy policy

The Ant Network website does not have a privacy policy about users’ data collecting, tracking, and sharing with third parties. Privacy policies are a legal requirement in the US, Canada, European Union, Australia, and India, Japan to ensure that companies do not use users’ data in unethical ways. Lacking a privacy policy is a major red flag. App creators could be sharing user data for benefit within the mining app, in the future video sharing platform or with 3rd parties.

Users’ complaints on Google Play store

We checked out user comments on the google play app store and found many users complaining about issues in the login and password, reduction in mining speed, inactive wallets, and resetting of coins after large earnings. For example:

  • “It keeps reducing my mining by half at the end of every mining cycle, by now my balance should have been over a hundred, and after the recent update my total balance just dropped down to 32.”
  • “I accidentally exited and now when I try to login using the right password it says it is wrong, and when I try to reset, it says mail not sent”
  • “Can’t access the wallet or even access a link to a wallet.”
  • “I already mined 200+coins but the app shows only 12 coins.”
  • “App keeps resetting my mining”

We also noticed that the network’s customer support team do not reply to the comments or reviews on the Google Play store.

What should you do now?

From our perspective, it seems that Ant Network is a scam with no real value to users in the long term. We don’t encourage people to invest any of their time or money in projects where anonymous creators can make profit off of the users’ time, and possibly data.

How to avoid potential scams?

To help people avoid possible scams, we’ve investigated different crypto projects to identify good and bad investments in the market, such as:

And we’ve also provided some insights about trending cryptocurrencies on exchanges which we also believe will not provide tangible profit to its owners. Feel free to read:

If you are considering investing in crypto projects, make sure to read our in-depth article on how to invest in crypto, avoid scams, and pick winners, and review our comprehensive list of cryptocurrency exchanges.

On the other had, there are currently government efforts to engage in the blockchain technology and provide digital currencies for the people. If you want to learn about this, feel free to read our articles:

In the end, this is our opinion about the topic, and we are interested in learning about your thoughts. Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments.

Cem Dilmegani

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 55% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem’s work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE and NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and resources that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem’s work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch like Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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