Helium aims to channel the power of the blockchain to spread WiFi

See Correction/Clarification at end of article

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Helium created what The New York Times called “a use for crypto after all.”

By using crypto as a reward, the company convinced people all over the world to install devices to help them create a decentralized wireless network currently accessible to about 10% of the world’s population, according to COO Frank Mong.

“We do believe that what we’ve created is a new economic model, powered by crypto,” he said. “Helium essentially solves the cold start problem of creating network infrastructure.”

The company, now called Nova Labs, was founded in 2013 in San Francisco by Amir Haleem and Shawn Fanning, one of the founders of Napster, with the intention of creating a peer-to-peer wireless network.

Initially they tried to grow the network manually by convincing individuals and businesses to install the devices that would act as hot spots for their network. But wasn’t until they launched the Helium blockchain network in 2019 that the network was able to really expand rapidly.

Mong said the idea to incorporate cryptocurrency came around 2017, when bitcoin and ethereum were shooting up in value and companies where launching initial coin offerings to raise funds. At the time Helium was running out of runway and looked toward crypto to capitalize on the trend while the market was hot and use it as a way to grow its network.

It starts with individuals who purchase a device for about $500 that creates a radio signal hot spot with about 200 times the range of most Wi-Fi devices, but transmits smaller amounts of data ideal for Internet of Things devices. The owners of these hot spots would be rewarded in HNT Helium tokens that can be sold for real money. The more that people use the network, the more tokens the device will mine. As the network grew, the price of HNT increased, adding more incentive for others to help build the network.

“Around the world we have 885,000 hot spots,” Mong said. “That’s across 66,000 cities, 180 countries and we’re adding about 40 to 50,000 hot spots per month.”

Helium was able to enter a space reserved for massive telecom companies and create a network of a size that would traditionally cost billions in infrastructure investment.

“You do not have to be AT&T or Verizon to go create a massive network that’s useful,” Mong said. “We’ve figured out how to use blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to group and enable communities of people to work together to create that infrastructure and in this new approach, the ownership belongs to the individual that’s doing the work.”

Helium is now in a transition phase. The company has given up ownership of the Helium network to a nonprofit called the Helium Foundation, a similar move to other companies that have created a popular blockchain such as Solana. The company has renamed its for-profit side to Nova Labs; it will work on building applications on the Helium ecosystem, while the actual blockchain is managed by the foundation.

Nova Labs is gearing up to launch a 5G network, this one targeting not just IoT devices but smartphones, after recently acquiring the startup FreedomFi, a company that builds software for crowdsourced 5G networks. Nova Labs has already deployed about 1,900 5G nodes across more than 40 states and 700 cities in the U.S. and is expected to go online sometime this year.

Nova Labs (formerly Helium Inc.)