Crypto fans raced to set up Helium hot spots and start generating crypto tokens. The new model, which was released in 2019, worked like a charm. If the price of those tokens rose, they’d make even more money, and set up even more hot spots.
Participants would be paid in crypto tokens, and they’d get to vote on proposed ideas for changes to the network.
Instead of building its network itself, Helium would make it fully decentralized and let users build it themselves by buying and connecting their own hot spots. So the company tore up its old business model and settled on a new one. “That incentive model, powered by crypto, actually made sense in this case,” Mr. But they struggled to get enough participants, and the network stalled.įrank Mong, Helium’s chief operating officer, told me that the company was running out of money in 2017 when an engineer suggested, during an all-hands Scotch-drinking session, that more people might be willing to set up hot spots if they could earn cryptocurrency by doing it. Its founders originally tried to build a long-range, peer-to-peer wireless network the old-fashioned way - by persuading people and businesses to set up hot spots and stringing them together. Helium, which was founded in 2013, didn’t start off as a crypto company.
These tokens can be bought and sold on the open market like any other cryptocurrency, and the more a hot spot is used, the more $HNT tokens it generates. Here’s where the crypto part comes in: In addition to transmitting data, Helium hot spots reward their owners for participating in the network by creating units of a cryptocurrency called $HNT. A spokesman for Lime said in an email that “beyond an initial test of its product in 2019, Lime has not had, and does not currently have, a relationship with Helium.”) 3, 2022: Months after this column was published, some of Helium’s partnerships came under scrutiny from crypto skeptics who claimed that the company was claiming affiliations with companies it had no official deals with. More than 500,000 Helium hot spots are in use around the world, with thousands being added to the network every day. These hot spots, which cost roughly $500 apiece and can reach 200 times farther than conventional Wi-Fi hot spots, share their owners’ bandwidth with nearby internet-connected devices - like parking meters, air-quality sensors or smart kitchen appliances.Īnyone can use the Helium network, although most of its users so far are companies like Lime (which has used Helium to keep tabs on its connected scooters) and the Victor mousetrap company (which uses it for a new line of internet-connected traps). The network is made up of devices called Helium hot spots, gadgets with antennas that can send small amounts of data over long distances using radio frequencies. On a basic level, Helium is a decentralized wireless network for “internet of things” devices, powered by cryptocurrency. And while it’s not the most attention-grabbing crypto project out there - no cartoon apes or copies of the Constitution are involved - trying it out has helped me understand how crypto can be quite useful in solving certain types of problems. Recently, though, I discovered one that does. But so far, not many crypto projects have had what I’d call “normie utility” - solving problems that exist for people outside the crypto world, that aren’t primarily about buying or selling digital assets and that would be impossible to solve with normal, non-crypto technology. There are plenty of crypto exchanges, NFT trading platforms and video games that involve buying and selling crypto tokens.
It’s a tough question to answer, in part because most of the successful (and legal) uses of cryptocurrency so far have been in finance or finance-adjacent fields. One of the most frequent questions asked by crypto skeptics is: What can you actually do with crypto, besides financial speculation and crimes?
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