I Lost My Salary That Day: How Roam Rebuilt Global Connectivity Without Asking for It

The Day the Network Chose Me

I didn’t chase the boom. I was on the other side of it—sitting alone in my North Beach apartment, watching $ROAM’s first trade echo through Bybit like a midnight heartbeat.

The numbers weren’t hype: $120M in 24 hours. 540K nodes self-built across 190 nations. No corporate towers rose.

Just Wi-Fi hotspots lit by strangers—travelers, coders, exiled workers—who plugged their phones into Solana’s silence and called it home.

The Protocol That Didn’t Speak

Roam didn’t promise ‘revolution.’ It whispered: ‘Connect freely.’ No roaming fees. No carrier trust. Just DID + VC + AI agents helping you turn your eSIM into a passport—to anywhere, on any chain, without asking permission.

I remember a woman in London paying £6700 for one hour of data. Roam made that fee vanish. The network didn’t grow because investors funded it. it grew because people chose to build it—with their spare bandwidth, in quiet corners of the world, on their own terms.

The Burn That Healed Us

On March 18th, in front of every exchange, in front of every algorithm, a simple rule flickered on: 97% of $ROAM burned forever. The market thought: ‘If you can’t own it… you won’t pay for it.’ The APY wasn’t an incentive—it was an invitation: to hold, to share, to be part of something that doesn’t need to be owned.

We’re not miners anymore. We’re node-keepers now—quietly tending light across continents, someone’s grandmother using WhatsApp to send her child a message; someone else sending crypto instead of cash to pay his rent; an artist tuning her laptop to stay connected while waiting for the bus— each node—a star in someone else’s sky.