Original Source: Overseas Unicorns
Original Source: Overseas Unicorns
Musk's Starlink is an innovation of the backbone network under aerospace communication. In essence, it still uses high capital investment of "corporate system" to achieve a more efficient network deployment method than traditional network operators.
And Helium is a change of the underlying economic model. With the governance method of DAO, it creatively proposes a sharing economic model based on blockchain, like Airbnb in the wireless network industry.You host a hotspot in your home and make sure it’s running, and all the IoT devices in the industry will come to “visit” and connect to your network. This is the value orientation of Helium's openness and no access. Different from the domineering charging scheme of the traditional communication industry, the users and contributors of the Helium network are scattered individuals and small organizations, which is a real "public network".
Setting up a hotspot is not complicated. You don’t need to understand wireless communication and encryption currency. You only need to set up the devices provided by Helium at home or in the office and connect to the Internet to provide network for IoT devices in your city;You obtain Helium's native token HNT in the network coverage proof mechanism of "witness" and "witnessed" countless times, and earn corresponding rewards through the data flow transmitted from your network.The network sovereignty Helium advocates allows us to own the value of the network and its data flow we provide.
The territory of the Helium network has been lit up in China since last April. The following hotspot called "Rare Mossy Porpoise/Rare Moss finless porpoise" in Xuhui District, Shanghai has launched/witnessed an average of 280 beacons per day in the past 7 days, and earned $9.22 worth of HNT in the past 24 hours.
Although Helium's current main force is the Internet of Things, the same model can be extended to other networks in the future. In the foreseeable future, there may beThe following is the table of contents of this article, and it is recommended to read it in combination with the main points.
The following is the table of contents of this article, and it is recommended to read it in combination with the main points.
01. Transforming the communication industry: starting from the "connection of things"
02. A major milestone for Helium
The Peer-to-Peer Wireless Network Revolution
The Birth of a New Economy: Introducing the Blockchain
03. "The Internet for the masses"
500,000 Hotspots "Spark"
LongFi: Low-cost and wide-coverage IoT network
04. Mechanism Design of Helium Blockchain
Dual Token Economic Model
Coverage Proof Mechanism
A Call for Action for Miners
05. Helium's competition and cooperation
06. Looking to the future
Make 5G infrastructure
Beware of the "Matthew Effect"
Corporate vs. DAO
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01.
Transforming the communications industry: starting from the "connection of things"
In the 1990s, the U.S. government issued a bill called Local Loop Unbundling, which stripped the downstream service rights of the early cable giants and distributed them to multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs), allowing them to use services from local hosts. Connections from network premises to customer premises to enhance competition. However, the actual situation is that Comcast and AT&T have jointly slowed down the expansion of "challengers" like Google Fiber through various means such as lobbying and litigation, and still dominate each other.
The power of telecommunications giants is indeed dreadful: AT&T once offered a price gradient of "paying for privacy", which requires a monthly "protection fee" of 29 US dollars so as not to sell your browsing records to advertisers; Selling your own Wifi hotspots to others, or quietly deploying LoRaWan (Long Range Wide Area Network) in your home, these operations are difficult to detect and turn off in the settings, and there are sufficient means of legal circumvention.
However, the long-standing communications industry has seen disruptors working in different fields: Starlink wants to"Human connection" is simpler, using satellite laser communication with significantly higher efficiency than existing optical fiber transmission, to provide low-latency, wide-coverage, Large-capacity communication network. And today we mainly introduceHelium is a subversive innovation to the existing IoT market from the perspective of "connection of things"。
Currently, more than 10 billion active IoT devices have many ways to connect and share data: IoT devices in homes and offices (such as smart door locks, smart lights, etc.) generally use standard Wi-Fi, Zigbee, etc. due to the short transmission distance required. Or low-power bluetooth; and most devices require a large transmission range (such as the Internet of Vehicles, asset tracking including logistics, agricultural equipment, and smart meter reading in the public service field, etc.),Must use low power wide area network, which is divided into wireless networks represented by LoraWAN and Sigfox, and cellular Internet of Things represented by LTE-M and Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT).
The development of the Internet of Things has not ushered in a big explosion, mainly due to the lack of a unified standard of wide area network support. ISPs have no incentive to do this, because the most industrial application scenarios in the Internet of Things field transmit data of several bits per second, such as temperature, humidity, and water level, and it is difficult to pay back.
As mentioned above, the networking methods of IoT devices are extremely fragmented, often bound to different protocols/technologies, and have low interoperability. Compared with the mobile devices commonly used by people such as mobile phones and computers,Internet of Things devices have never ushered in an equivalent of WiFi or Bluetooth, which represents an open standard based on open hardware, allowing various devices to achieve programmability and configurability to connect and collaborate with each other.Helium wanted to innovate a model to fill this vacuum in a more efficient way than ISPs.
From the perspective of the supply side, Helium has established a decentralized peer-to-peer wireless network, and uses the incentive mechanism of the blockchain to give people the motivation to maintain this system. Under this system, everyone owns his part of the network and data flow the value of. Helium uses the "power of the masses" to provide hotspots and allow devices from other networks to access the Helium network through roaming, hoping to open up the global IoT ecosystem. Providers of the Helium network earn Helium's native token HNT based on a "Proof of Coverage" mechanism.
From the demand side, Helium transfers the decentralized low cost to customers who use the network (including the main applications of the Internet of Things, such as logistics supply chain, smart city, smart agriculture, environmental monitoring and other use cases), providing long-term low-cost IoT devices that consume power for long-distance data transmission provide a flexible access method without locking any long-term data contracts with any network operator.
With the curtain call of 3G, it is estimated that 2 billion IoT devices using cellular will be interrupted, either to higher cost 4G networks and private networks, or to open wireless networks represented by Helium. Under the pricing of the Helium alternative, each IoT device requires tens of dollars of expenditure every year, and tens of billions of IoT devices supportMarket value of hundreds of billions of dollars. By comparison, we will find that,Helium's charges are fairly restrained($0.00001 per 24 bytes of data transfer, paid in the form of Data Credits under the Helium blockchain) - Relying on exponential cost reductions, Helium has the opportunity to redefine the rules of the game for IoT network providers.
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02.
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The Peer-to-Peer Wireless Network Revolution
Helium was born in 2013. At the beginning of its establishment, it received investment from a number of Silicon Valley star VCs (including Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, FirstMark Capital, SV Angel, etc.), and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff also invested in his own name.
These believers are largely attracted by Lianchuang Shawn Fanning. Fanning can be said to be a legend in the Web 2.0 era. He founded the peer-to-peer music sharing platform Napster in 1999 (similar to domestic PPS, Thunder, VeryCD), although sanctions on copyright issues forced Napster to survive in another form (It was just acquired by a VR Concerts company last year), but the P2P technology and spirit it represents directly inspired a series of followers of decentralized peer-to-peer transmission protocols, such as Gnutella and FreeNet.
Another co-creator, Amir Haleem, is a game genius who served as the CTO of a game start-up company, made "Battlefield 1942" (the series was acquired by Electronics Arts), and was once the world e-sports champion of "Thor's Hammer": he and Fanning became acquainted because of the game.
Around 2012, Amir and Fanning had a mutual friend’s start-up company. When designing children’s positioning bracelets, it was difficult to solve the problem of sensor networking. This pain point resonated with the two.
At that time, the Internet of Things had just started, and traditional communication giants focused on providing high-bandwidth networks for household devices such as computers and mobile phones, and paid little attention to low-power consumption and low-bandwidth network requirements.The Helium team is determined to change the existing IoT wireless network, so that devices can communicate with each other in an open frequency band, without relying on signing expensive data plans with suppliers like mobile computers.As CEO Amir puts it:
"We are trying to build a completely open wireless network protocol, which can work in an orderly manner based on some commercial radio hardware, without relying on Helium itself. We are just the designers of all this."
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The Birth of a New Economy: Introducing the Blockchain
Amir and Fanning groped for a period of time, tried to do vertical classes, make application layers, and build their own networks. In 2014, then CTO Sean Carey made a multi-tenant, more secure and reliable version of Node-Red (a programming tool developed by IBM that connects hardware devices, APIs and online services), based on "Helium - Municipal - Consumer's home/office" layer-3 bridge deployment, when users want to transmit data, they have to send a string of codes at the routing layer, which is very unfriendly to non-technical enthusiasts. Without exception, these attempts have all failed.
The team quickly realized, "The only way for this network to really grow is to not build it". The blockchain technology that became popular in 2017 inspired them to "decentralize" the construction of the network: with its transparency and self-confirmation, Helium can provide an incentive mechanism for laying a global network and an efficient liquidation mechanism, Let everyone provide the network without permission.
Participants of the Helium network only need to set up Helium devices at home or in the office and connect to the Internet to provide tens of kilometers of low-power networks for the city where the number of IoT devices is small (thus not affecting own wifi speed), as a reward, a new cryptocurrency HNT can be mined. The users of the network should use the Data Credits obtained by burning HNT as a medium to pay to the network according to the amount of data transmission.
In 2019, Multicoin Capital and Union Square Ventures co-led Helium's Series C round. The investor of Multicoin, Tushar Jain, helped Helium build a beautiful token economic model, and the dual token and consensus mechanism of Helium we see now has his contribution.
In August 2021, top institutions in the encryption world such as a16z, 10T, and Alameda Research, a quantitative encryption exchange under FTX, also joined Helium's $110 million ICO.
The introduction of blockchain is undoubtedly the most important milestone in Helium's history, since then Helium has completed its role transformation from a technology solution provider to a new wireless network economy.
Let's take a look at how investors define and look forward to the future of Helium from different perspectives——
Tushar, an economic genius investor at Multicoin, said:
"Not since the advent of Ethereum smart contracts have we seen a more ambitious vision in the blockchain space than Helium: Helium represents a new approach to deploying and managing wireless networks at scale, disrupting the cost structure of traditional communications .”
Nick Grossman of USV (who voted for Coinbase and Dune Analytics) said:
“Imagine a world where devices automatically connect to open networks, without the need to sign a contract with a cell phone carrier or set up a credit card account, just like the old radio experience: you buy the device home, turn it on, and it’s ready to go. Wireless internet can't do that at the moment, but in time Helium can realize such a networked world."
The founder of Alameda Research, the famous Sam Bankman-Fried, was fascinated by the intersection of the crypto world and the "real world":
“It’s never been seen that the incentives in the crypto world can be used to deploy real-world infrastructure.”
a16z placed Helium in a unique position in their thesis:
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03.
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500,000 Hotspots "Spark"
Helium named its network People's Network, "People's Network", which is by far the fastest growing wireless network in the world, expanding at an average rate of 90,000 hotspots per month. Currently, more than 500,000 hotspots cover nearly 40,000 worldwide City.
These 500,000 "hotspots" are actually small boxes that combine hotspots and mining machines, much like routers. The entire hardware device is open source, which seems counter-intuitive. After all, other IoT network service providers such as The Things Network, Comcast's MachineQ, and even Senet, which only sought cooperation with Helium last year, will charge according to the number of devices. It ranges from tens to hundreds of dollars a month.
Talking about the reasons for not using hardware to make money, COO Frank Mong said:
"We have polished the code behind Helium Hotspot for a long time, and it is quite complicated. But everything Helium does is to clear the barriers, so we don't want to realize the so-called "patents". This kind of rent-seeking behavior will only hinder our substantial penetration. It is not conducive to the development of the network."
Helium originally manufactured its own hardware, mainly to standardize the entire hardware configuration and software running-in. At the beginning, it held the idea of open source, and would not do a set of old-age giant standard actions of "acquiring hardware companies and monopolizing the global supply chain". The more and better suppliers come in, the competition can be strengthened, costs can be reduced, and the network effect of global hotspots can be better played.
At present, there are 25 officially recognized suppliers of Helium Hopspot, all of which are priced below $500. Due to the shortage of chips and other reasons, the market has been in a state of severe shortage. The pre-orders are 500,000 units, while the original OG hotspots were fired. As high as $5,000.
In the first half of this year, it is planned to expand the number of suppliers to 75, and will fully launch Light Hotspots (that is, no longer store full nodes, and transfer the consensus work to "verifiers" to make hotspots more "light", the following blockchain PoC The mechanism will be discussed), the production speed will be greatly improved after the structure is simplified, and the price is expected to be lowered to below 150 US dollars. These factors will bring about the rapid expansion of network nodes.
People connect Helium hotspots to their Wi-Fi and place them in suitable locations (the Helium channel on Discord has lots of great tips from signal science experts, such as by a lake, the surface of the water provides a natural runway for the signal, can spread farther), the hotspot automatically extracts data from Helium customers' IoT sensors via the open-source LongFi protocol. The hotspot then encrypts the data and sends it to the cloud specified by the customer, allowing them to track and collect information from the device.
Unlike the horrific energy consumption of GPU mining, Helium hotspots only require as much power as a 12-watt LED light bulb to operate, so the biggest cost miners incur is the one-time cost of purchasing the hardware.
Of course, Helium's audience is not limited to those who understand wireless communication and cryptocurrency.Helium provides hardware, interactive software for hotspot providers and users, and routing of data to user-specified clouds, this whole set of equipment, also considerately randomly generates a name consisting of three words for each hotspot (as shown in the figure below"Sharp Tiny Trout"secondary title
LongFi: Low-cost and wide-coverage IoT network
The underlying protocol that Helium's hotspots receive and deliver data is based on LoRaWan. This Layer 1 decision is by no means a slap in the face, but a suitable choice in terms of bandwidth, power consumption, network deployment difficulty, and applicable scenarios.
LoRaWan is based on RF radio technology and has three main advantages.
The radio frequency band is open and does not require a license (on the contrary, the frequency band used by 4G needs to be auctioned, and those big communication companies often compete for blood);
The layout of LoRaWan hotspots is flexible. Unlike cellular data transmission, which has high requirements for base station location, it requires a lot of effort to optimize the network (including considering the distance between base stations, collaboration methods, boundaries, etc.). Laying hotspots in the LoRaWan environment allows a certain degree of redundancy. One of the best examples is Los Angeles, currently the city with the most dense Helium network hotspots, with more than 6,000 hotspots, but in fact, a typical city only needs less than 200 hotspots to cover;
The natural property of RF radio technology chirping (named for the signal's resemblance to birdsong) is the ability to transmit information-dense signals over long distances with low energy consumption.
And these are exactly what Helium wants:
Helium doesn't want a large part of its cost structure to be used to buy spectrum licenses, which is where they want to draw a line from traditional communications companies. Helium 5G also uses the CBRS license-free frequency band in the United States. In its international expansion, they are also actively looking for corresponding low-latency and high-bandwidth frequency bands in various countries, instead of focusing on a large number of government relations, lobbying and Spectrum Advocacy superior;
The flexible layout means that Helium can adopt a "laissez-faire" governance method without over-planning the density of hotspots;
It can be transmitted to a long distance with low energy consumption, and it is a match made in heaven with IoT devices. The data transmission volume of IoT devices is small and the demand for bandwidth is small, but also because of its wide dispersion, long-distance transmission is required.
Helium combines LoRaWAN and the Helium blockchain to form the "LongFi" protocol, and any LoRaWAN device can transmit data on this network. It is called 'Long'-Fi because the radiation range is 200 times wider than Wifi. Meanwhile, devices using the LongFi protocol can achieve thousands of times the battery efficiency per bit of LTE.
For IoT customers who want to access the LongFi network, Helium's charging model is based on the received data packets (much like the usage-based model popular in SaaS), which is negligible compared with the data plan fees of existing network operators .Say you're a bike-sharing service, and you have 1,000 bikes with GPS sensors and want them to update their location every 10 minutes, and it only costs about $525 for a whole year. Whether it's AT&T or Vodafone, the cheapest plan is $3 per device per month, which is $36,000 a month, 70 times the cost of LongFi.
LongFi also provides a roaming function. Non-Helium traffic can be received by the Helium network and transmitted to other LoRaWAN networks. While expanding the usage of the Helium network, the network receiving its traffic does not need to deploy a gateway or network server, which can greatly reduce the initial infrastructure. cost. at present,Helium has already reached cooperation with Senet and Actility (both large-scale LoRaWAN networks), and roaming will become one of the biggest driving forces for Helium's network in the future.
One might question the privacy issue - don't worry, the encryption of packets on the Helium network happens between the sensor and the company's servers, hotspots can't identify individual packets, they can only see the plain text identifier of where it was sent.
Of course, in addition to object tracking, Helium has many IoT use cases. For example, Boston Brew Co. uses Helium's "water level monitoring" capability to provide "automatically renewing" cold brew coffee barrels; and drone companies such as DRONEDEK cooperate to deliver express delivery ; car networking company DIMO uses Helium 5G network to transmit vehicle data, allowing people to get rewards for sharing driving data.
San Jose, the core city of Silicon Valley, has set an excellent example of the Public-Private Partnership under the Helium network: the city provides Helium hotspots to more than 1,300 low-income residents who are not connected to the Internet, and subsequent Helium network rewards can continue to subsidize them. It can also connect to climate-related projects such as air quality monitoring and fire detection.
Earlier this year, DataGovs, a Miami-based organization based in "the world's most climate-vulnerable coastal city" (whose clients include local governments, the electric vehicle industry, and the construction industry), partnered with Helium. DataGovs focuses on climate change, sustainable development, and urban transportation, using Helium network-compatible sensors to monitor variables in the physical world such as water, air quality, and assets.
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04.
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Dual Token Economic Model
People's Network uses two tokens: HNT and Data Credits.
HNT is the original asset on the Helium blockchain, with a total of 223 million, without pre-allocation (the Helium founding team chose not to create some tokens out of thin air for themselves, the first HNT was dug out from the genesis block ), all used to incentivize the different roles that contribute to the Helium network.
Initially 5 million HNT per month, then halved every two years (from August 1, 2021, the net issuance of HNT will drop to 2.5 million per month; the next halving will occur on August 1, 2024 , then the monthly release will be reduced to 1.25 million HNT)
The distribution system of HNT rewards is as follows: Initially, nearly 70% of HNT shares are distributed to Hotspot owners who build network coverage; as the network continues to develop, hotspots earn more and more by transferring device data on this network Helium Inc. and investors take less and less shares (35% in the first year, decreasing by 1% year by year until it drops to 15%); after 20 years, the quota will not be adjusted and will remain fixed.
Data Credits is a rare application token in the history of the blockchain (like airline mileage, you can only use it in the Helium ecosystem), users need to pay with Data Credits to transmit data bytes through the Helium LongFi wireless protocol Blockchain transaction fees.
The price of Data Credits is fixed in US dollars (1 Data Credit = $0.00001), and to obtain Data Credits, network users can redeem HNT or obtain them from HNT owners; any HNT converted into Data Credits will be permanently removed from the circulating supply ("Burning coins" to achieve Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium).
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Coverage Proof Mechanism
Bitcoin's mechanism of using hashes to secure the network is called Proof of Work (PoW). This is a very robust system that has been proven for a long time. The only drawback is that it does not provide any other value other than protecting the entire system. Helium BlockchainRather than relying on computing power, radio waves are used as a form of mining, with gateways "challenging" each other by sending encrypted packets.
Specifically, the Helium gateway had to prove three things: it was actually running, it was where it said it was, and it was actually creating wireless network coverage. Accordingly, Helium has established a fair and effective mechanism,Real-time verification of whether hotspots provide wireless network coverage through real positioning to motivate network expansion—this is Proof of Coverage (PoC).
Every 360 blocks, the "challenger" in the Helium network constructs a data packet called "PoC challenge" through the peer-to-peer network, and randomly sends an inquiry to a "challenged". Because the challenger does not have any "real work", the HNT reward share obtained only accounts for about 0.9% of the total HNT.
After receiving the challenge information, the challenged hotspot will initiate an indiscriminate radio beacon (RF Beacon) based on the challenge information. If the coverage is indeed good, surrounding hotspots should be able to detect the beacon, relaying the information back to the Helium network as a witness for verification. Each challenge requires a valid witness, and the challenged can obtain the corresponding rewards. Sending beacons is more valuable than issuing challenges, so the "challenged" rewards account for 5.31%.
For the hotspot witnesses who received the beacon, their responsibility is to send the challenge information back to the Helium network. Miners who provide proof are selected into the consensus group about every 30 blocks, receive transactions submitted by other miners and pack them into blocks; A series of logics such as rationality are used to determine whether this witness is valid. After effective witnessing, the witness will receive up to 20.08% share reward.
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A Call for Action for Miners
Maybe you will be entangled in one thing, that is, as the number of hotspots increases rapidly, the revenue of a single hotspot will inevitably shrink. Is it too late to buy Helium hotspots now?
Helium's team has always said that they are on a multi-dacade journey, especially compared to the history of those century-old communication companies (especially in terms of their market value), we are still at the entrance of Helium's cave, and we are far from seeing his paradise.
Under this decentralized network with the promise of "Global Unified Network Protocol", hotspots are not in competition, but are working together to make the network coverage wider and wider. The greater the value of the network, the greater the value of HNT, and you The part of the network you own is worth more.
There is no basis for empty talk. The figure below is an estimate of Helium's payback model in 2019 by Tushar of Multicoin Capital.
He believes that the growth of the Helium network will give an upward push to the price of HNT, and a higher price will mean a higher return on investment for Helium hotspot owners, which will further promote network growth ("The Helium Flywheel"). At that time, he assumed that the price of HNT would reach $6.92 by the end of 2021, and that the network would grow to 100,000 hotspots, and the payback period for new hotspots would be only 46 days.
Obviously he seriously underestimated on both indicators. There are now 500,000 hotspots on the Helium network, and the price of HNT has reached $33. So even if the HNT allocated to each hotspot is discounted to 1/5 every month, the nearly 5 times the HNT price still makes the average daily income reach 7.26 US dollars, and the payback takes 48 days.
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05.
Helium's competition
Some people think that Helium is the blockchain implementation of the LoRaWAN protocol, and the core is to add an incentive layer to the Internet of Things network, similar to the relationship between Filecoin and IPFS. This statement is unfair.
Filecoin and IPFS are complementary protocols for storing and sharing data in a distributed network. Both are free, open source, and share many building blocks, including a data representation format (IPLD) and a network communication protocol (libp2p). However, Helium has rewritten the communication method between nodes and even the expression of the entire backhaul routing from scratch, and its originality and threshold are higher.
And companies like The Things Network, even if they do a great job of building a community-driven network, the biggest problem is that people don't have enough incentives to keep devices online and functioning properly. From this perspective, Helium's economic mechanism is indeed one of its greatest creations.
Amazon Sidewalk, which also has a centralized layout, is also a very heart-warming project of Sima Zhao. Because of Amazon's special ecological niche, they have been looking for opportunities other than computers and smartphones. The successively launched consumer electronics (Alexa, smart glasses, bracelets, etc.), including Sidewalk, are all data collection media: Amazon hopes to start from Monetize data on all your interactions with the physical world. Motivation aside, Amazon’s devices are different from Helium’s, and the former is significantly less tolerant of latency (for example, if you are connected to the Sidewalk network at home and want to turn off a smart light, of course you want this data feed to be instant, while Instead of waiting two minutes to turn off), devices under the Helium network allow for a certain delay.
From the perspective of large distributed network categories, there are some similar vertical companies around Helium, such as Planetwatch, which specializes in environmental monitoring, WeatherFX, which specializes in temperature, humidity and air pressure, and Hivemapper, which specializes in decentralized maps. For another example, there is a project called Wificoin on Techcrunch's hackathon. By sharing the access rights of wifi routers, users can get coins, and these coins can be used to buy wifi rights from others.
Generally speaking,Helium is on the way to open up a global network, with greater ambitions and more arduous efforts. Rather than creating competition, it is better to say that Helium will have top-to-bottom compatibility for these distributed networks with different layouts in the future.As Helium's BD head said: We don't see them as competitors, we want to bring them to our network.
More worthy of our attention, is the spark that Helium and Starlink may produce.
Starlink is a disruptor of the traditional ISP industry. It uses thousands of satellites to form a backbone communication network on the surface, and users build data receivers on the ground to access this network. In the past, it relied on the connection between national and regional optical cables, but Starlink directly faces the world.
Starlink is very suitable for underdeveloped areas. To some extent, it is a kind of equal rights for network connections, but the problem is that the cost is high (although the cost of satellite laying is lower than that of optical fiber, it is essentially a capital-heavy model that is no different from traditional ISPs. Helium The decentralized model is not in the same order of magnitude), and the power consumption of the receiving equipment is too large, so it may not be feasible to lay it in underdeveloped areas.
According to Gao Yuan, head of Helium Asia Pacific, the possible synergy in his mind isStarlink provides open source hardware standards (satellite configuration, communication between satellites, communication between satellites and launchers, etc.), and Helium provides the underlying settlement mechanism, which will decentralize the capital-heavy infrastructure.
Talking about the threat of satellites being directly connected to sensors as hotspots, founder and CEO Amir believes that the capabilities are more complementary, especially the complementarity of surface and non-surface coverage. Each of Helium's hotspots is a node in a global network of transceivers whose main function is to receive information from IoT sensors and pass it on to its final destination over the Internet (a process known as "backhaul"). Currently, Helium One of the key directions is to find a backhaul network partner to achieve better network coverage in highways, farms, and remote areas, and this is what Starlink satellite communication service providers can provide.
SpaceX has acquired Swarm, a company that provides IoT devices and connectivity via tiny satellites. The satellite service market centered on the Internet of Things is developing rapidly. It is estimated that by 2025, about 30.3 million satellite Internet of Things devices will be deployed worldwide, with a compound annual growth rate of nearly 40%.
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06.
looking to the future
Make 5G infrastructure
In April last year, Helium and the open source 5G connection service provider Freedomfi cooperated to combine HNT mining machines and 5G antennas to launch the first generation of 5G hotspots compatible with the Helium network. This network is different from the narrowband network for IoT devices. It has the characteristics of short distance, high bandwidth, and low latency, and can be connected to mobile phones and computers. This means that Helium has begun to enter the 2C market.
Within a few days of opening the pre-order channel, FreedomFi sold 40,000 5G gateways, which is comparable to the sales of Verizon (currently the largest wireless communication service provider in the United States).
The demand for 5G base station density is 25 times that of 4G. The bottleneck of traditional communication companies' network deployment capabilities is obvious. The centralized and capital-heavy wireless network infrastructure is destined to be unable to scale and be unsustainable.
We do see that more and more network operators hope to cooperate with Helium through roaming, so that their customers can take advantage of Helium's network coverage. GigSky recently launched the first Helium 5G-based cellular mobile plan. The GigSky app will enable seamless roaming between mainstream US mobile networks and Helium-based CBRS distribution networks, and will give priority to Helium network coverage to help consumers cut costs. At the end of October last year, Dish Network became the first head operator in the telecom industry to join the Helium ecosystem.
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Beware of the Matthew Effect
In the section introducing the blockchain, we pointed out that in order for the challenged to pass the challenge, a witness must detect the beacon they initiated and send it back to the Helium network to complete the PoC proof. And the reward size of the Helium network is completely based on the number of these PoC actions.
This means that if you set up a hotspot in the desert, you are arguably credited with providing a lot of valuable extra capacity to the network from that solitary hotspot. But ironically, it paid off next to nothing because there was no one to witness. So, unless you can bring a group of friends and set up a few more hotspots there, normal people have no incentive to plant flags in faraway places.
On the contrary, in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, because of the large number of witnesses, it is easier to earn rewards through PoC challenges, so there is a redundant phenomenon of more than 20,000 hotspots in a city in Los Angeles. The Matthew effect of "the weak get weaker" is detrimental to the breadth and balance of network coverage in the long run.
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Corporate vs. DAO
In addition to the company itself, Helium also has a DeWi foundation decentralized wireless network alliance, which is the Helium Foundation, a DAO.
DeWi has promoted Helium's exploration of the network's governance program and development direction, such as the advancement of HIP. The full name of HIP is Helium Improvement Protocol, which is some network improvement suggestions that Helium's 50,000 community members will publish on Github from time to time. For example, the launch of 5G is a HIP solution proposed by the CEO of FreedomFi, which was implemented only after it was widely recognized by the community.
As for Helium Inc itself, it is more of an operation and execution role. The main work includes code management, HIP implementation, development and maintenance of important blockchain infrastructure, etc. The collaboration between the two can be described as very clear.
Of course, the whole team at Helium radiates Web 3 light. What impressed me most was that when asked about the future roadmap of Helium, COO Frank Mong jokingly said, "It depends on you to make suggestions, you are all passengers on this plane, we just ensure the smooth operation of the plane That's all." We're just keeping the plane flying, really very DAO spirit.
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The Future of a Global One Network Protocol
Gary Gensler, chairman of the American Stock Exchange, said last year that many cryptocurrencies are actually securities and need to be subject to the supervision of the stock exchange. Of course, policy pressure affects the β of the entire encrypted world, but it is enough to be alert that the blockchain is not a place outside the law, and the regime still has considerable influence on its development. The dynamic game between regimes also affects Helium. Based on the huge pattern of global network coverage.
We saw the news that Liechtenstein will have nationwide Helium network coverage in the future. What will the response of traditional telecommunications companies (especially nationalized ones) and governments in other countries look like?
The endgame of Helium is to hope for a future with a global unified network protocol. Helium's native tokens HNT and Data Credit will become the default universal currency for data transmission. On this road, there are many forces robbing, interoperability of different underlying protocols, cooperation framework between network operators and Helium, and management methods between countries and regions. There is no experience for reference. Helium's story is exciting, but it's also a long one.
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