Hello and welcome to episode of the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization. And the blockchain revolution. My name is Brian Crane and I'm totes. Dave, Amir Helene, and he's the founder and CEO of helium. Helium is using kind of like Q crypto networks to build out the wireless network, like very cool and really excited to dive into that with him before we go into that, just a brief word from our sponsors.
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little bit about helium. And I think there's like so much. That's like, really fascinating there to dive in. But also, one thing where I was like, continuously, like I don't really like understand this. And with, After Ike, maybe dive in, if you go like straight there is like what's it like wireless network and like why is why your wireless networks? Interesting?
Yeah, good question. I mean, helium definitely sort of an odd one in the crypto space like compared to others because we were doing the sort of physical world thing, and that's when all the only one. But but certainly one of only very few, you know, that the mission for helium really started way before our crypto Adventure, like we started the company to try and build basically, a big sensor Network,
right? Like we wanted people to be able to connect sensors to the internet and do it really cheaply and not have to For cell phone plan and be able to run on batteries. And, you know, the kind of stuff that people describe as the internet of things. And that was sort of the mission objective of the company. And it took us, you know, a few years of sort of trying different approaches before we ended up realizing that sort of
decentralizing. The building of the network was probably the best way to like, actually make that happen. Right? Like you want to build this sort of global scale, very ubiquitous thing and this sort of like the we'll approach has been many billions of dollars doing that. Right? Which is what you see from, like a traditional Telco. Whether it's AT&T, or Vodafone, or orange, or whatever. And then the new approach, which I think helium is sort of pioneered here is like, don't
own the network, right? Like, let let the people build the network and participate in the economics of it. And that's sort of the approach that we started down in 2017 and it's kind of where we are today. Now, I would love to maybe stay a little bit on the even the prior question. So you saying like, you know, an iot Network.
Why didn't it work for these sensors to connect with like why are there particular I do use cases or, you know, is there a particular scenario that you want to see established where like this is really crucial? Or did you just think it was like a big underserved Market or like what's kind of that makes
that problem. So interesting, I think both You know, at the time that we started the company we and I sort of mentioned this on another podcast like last week, I think, but we actually happen to have a bunch of entrepreneur friends that were building like connected Hardware products. And that was a big part of like the Genesis of the company. Was that you know, these guys had very specific problems that
they were looking to solve. Like one guy was building, you know, connected baby monitors, kind of like a little baby bracelet and one guy was building a people counter and like You know. And so those are the kinds of applications where you want to connect to the internet, but it has to be really small and it has to be battery-powered and
has to be really cheap. And there's, you know, hundreds or thousands, or Millions even applications that we've sort of discovered over the years that are really, really interesting that are impossible to serve. Some of them are like, obvious like package. Tracking, at a granular level. Right? Like, if I wanted to know specifically, like we're a package, is not just what truck. It's on, you need kind of like a throwaway types.
Answer, right? It has to be like Ultra cheap and Ultra small and run on like a coin cell battery or something like that. And then, you know, it goes all the way through to like, you know, Wildfire sensors, right? Like, where I live up here in the North Bay Area. Like, we have a lot of fires and, you know, the Department of Forestry is someone that we've talked to about building Wildfire sensors, for example, right?
Like, they want to know, when's when fires start, so they can put them out more quickly before they become like a blazing Inferno. And so, you know, the use cases are Like extremely wide. And I expect to start to see like consumer applications. Like so far iot is really been focused on my business or Enterprise or commercial things and usually related to like asset tracking or, you know, environmental monitoring or something like that.
But now I think because helium exists in because as a sort of broad scale, Network that people can use really, really cheaply. We're starting to see other types of application like there. Now pet trackers, you know, like dog and cat trackers on the network like bike trackers, like portable GPS, trackers like, I think we're early and figuring out what the consumer applications are. But I think there's going to be plenty of them and it's going to be like even more on the
industrial and B2B side. Okay, cool. And are there particular use cases that you're especially excited about? I mean, the the the Wildfire one is always been super interesting to me, just because it's frustrating that were in like 20 22. And we still have this problem and like we literally can't do anything about it, right? Like a fire starts and then it's like a hundred acres and like people homes, get destroyed and
people die. And it's you know, just one of those things that if we had better like sensing of like, you know, generally things will be better. And as a result of fires. Get ready, bad air quality and so like better air quality sensing is nice.
And, you know, there's just that I think the promise of iot was always supposed to be like, you know, if you had this universe of sensors, like life would just be better in general like you would you would know much more about literally everything you came into contact with and I still find that to be a really interesting sort of Universe of problems. And then, you know, as you as you may know like helium is also. Now venturing into other types
of wireless network, right? So even though it started as an iot Network and still, Is, you know, predominantly and iot network also, starting to move into things like cellular and Wi-Fi, and I think really, the really, the discovery of helium was that, like, you could actually incentivize building, all kinds of wireless networks this way and iot just happened to be the first one that we thought was the least. Well, served or had the biggest sort of pain point.
And so when you say cellular because I was hearing, I think I heard like an old podcast of yours where you were asked that question and then you were like basically talking about my God. That's really hard and like, I think you asked about five T. So, how can you talk a little bit about, you know, how has the network it will? When you say it's going to be on the, it's starting to go beyond this iot sensors here. I mean, if you think about what helium really is done.
It's really to to enable people to like become participants in like Wireless infrastructure building, right? The fact that it was an iot Network, kind of irrelevant to some extent, right? Like, it was really, it was really more that we sort of hit upon the right, like, economic design. And I, you know, I think making it easy for people to participate in the network from sort of a user experience. Standpoint was really important, right? Like most crypto mining or most
like iot gateways. They're not consumer-friendly, right? Like if you try using an A Minor or you try using like an iot Gateway, like they suck. And so one of the one of the things that I think we did really well at the start was trying to make this really easy to use for consumers. Just like random people basically, right? And so I think that was important. But if you think about that sort of extrapolating it out you could you could sort of do that
with any kind of network. Or I like the fact that we started with iot was was you know, because it was a problem that we were keen on solving that we thought was needed. But very quickly, we realized and started getting inbound demand for like. Well, what about, you know, building a cellular network this way? Rightly. Could you could you have people deploy, you know, equipped like our device called a hotspot.
It's like a box about that big. And the question was like, what if there was a cellular version of that? Right? Good people become like, miniature cell tower hosts, basically. And, you know, there's a lot of things that have happened over the last few years that have now made that possible like this, unlicensed Spectrum now that you can actually use this. So, Spectrum access at least, in the United States. And most of the, most of the world is the problem, right?
Like the spectrum is owned by Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile and like these massive like corporations and the multiple billions of dollars spent on Spectrum, but recently the FCC here in the states unlicensed this block of spectrum that they call the Citizens Band Radio Service and that's a really big deal because it means that we can operate a cellular network without needing to spend multiple billions of dollars buying spectrum and that's so that's a huge deal.
And the other part that makes it also huge deal. Is that a lot of cell phones already support this rights. If you have an iPhone 11 12, 13, or if you have any like modern Galaxy Device or any modern pixel, like they already support cbers as a frequency. Band, which is the other part of the big deal, right? Like you need to be able to have devices that can take advantage of the network.
And then the last part of the big deal is that there's now like open-source software Stacks that allow you to run like miniature cell towers basically, right? So Facebook has this project called magma and that's a big deal to because usually, you know, getting it to the cellular like infrastructure business, even the cheapest smallest, you know, cell tower is going to be tens of thousands of dollars in cost. Right?
And so now all of a sudden you've got like all of these things that make it Supposed to have a 500 dollar box, be a cell tower, but basically right. And so that's that's sort of the next step of helium is like, okay, we figured out how to like incentivize the building of wireless networks in general, and now we're going to start doing it for other stuff Beyond iot. And the next thing that we're really focused on is cellular. That's really interesting.
And if cellular do you think in the future? Will it be okay? I can get, you know, mobile phone number Mobile sort of, you know relationship. If you know Vodafone AT&T, you know where T Mobile or helium. Will it be like that kind of thing, or will it be more sort of like a backbone to other cellular Networks? I expect it to initially be more on the sort of backbone side.
Like, you know, most, it's going to getting nerdy on like cell networks for a second, but, like most cell networks, particularly in the states are, like, actually really, like, comprised of, like, multiple different networks that, that work together. Right? So, like, even though you're using your phone and it says, AT&T in the corner, like a lot of times you're actually hopping around between lots of different networks that AT&T just has a business relationship with right.
Like, especially if you go into like a Sarina or if you go into an airport, or you go, you know, usually another company is actually operating the cellular network inside those venues. And then they're sharing the data back with AT&T and it's all very seamless for the consumer Ryan. Like for you, you're just on AT&T and like nothing has really
changed. So if you think of it in those terms and you imagine how big helium could get as a cellular network, it becomes like this gigantic like infrastructure layer that I expect other networks to start to take advantage of. So like we announced this with Dish Network's recently. So dish is going to start roaming their Customers on to the network.
And so that's a really big deal. But I expect it to sort of spread to other carriers to like, there's no reason why every carrier wouldn't want to take advantage of like, you know, a multiple hundred thousand node Network. That's just sitting there that you could use. I also expect new carriers to form. Right? Like, I know that there are lots of companies that are looking to build, you know, carrier 2.0 or Carrier 3.0 in the same way that, you know, lots of like
financial institutions. Now exist, that sort of the modern-day version of a bank. Like there's lots of I've been trying to do that and like helium becomes kind of a perfect like infrastructure layer for them to use. So they don't have to like deal with someone like Verizon and it's obviously significantly cheaper and it's going to be like located in places where it's just not feasible to like, put a cell tower for the most part. So, it's going to be super interesting.
It's a very different way to very different way, to build a network, and I think that's just going to result in a network. That's just very different, right. It's going to be much cheaper and it's going to be in the coverage, is going to be in places that you wouldn't usually expect. And it's going to be I think fascinating to watch that evolved. Wow, that's amazing. And then he will also be of course, Global right by default. I mean, it gets hard, like the u.s. Is really the only modern
country that has unlicensed. So because of pain on these tdrs for that. Exactly. And so I'm hopeful that like everyone is going to do some version of this because it's really a big deal to be able to run like, you know, open source. Cellular network is like a huge is a huge thing. And so I'm Full that other countries are going to start to do the same thing. But for now like we're sort of focused on the US just because we've, you know, that problem is already solved, right?
Oh, I didn't realize. I guess the question could also be if there's like some sort of, you know doll or treasury or something that could be then basically by Spectrum in other countries, and I love that. You said it's been something that I've been thinking about for a while. It's like, you know, you see Dao's form to by the Constitution or like the Wu-Tang album or or Whatever.
And and you'll be awesome to think of it in a, in in sort of the context of buying Spectrum. It's like the best possible like people owned asset, right? It shouldn't really be owned by like a company. And so, yeah, I love that idea. And it's also an asset of like tremendous value that just keeps going up in value. Right? And so could totally see it. Unfortunately. The entry fee is really high like, you know, multiple billions or tens of billions, but it's possible.
It's doable. You know, I think it could be, I think it could be done. And I think once he lie, In the cellular world is rolling. Like, it'll be a pretty good like, example of like, here's what you could do in, you know, Europe if we just banded together and like, bought enough Spectrum to go do it. Yeah, and I mean, I think the thing is, Right, we've an idea like that.
And if you look at something like Tesla, then I think you have to sort of like crazy improbable idea and you know, because people were like, okay, but I, you know, I think this has a chance and they buy up the stock and he has this like, gigantic valuation it Especially this almost, you know, unlimited stream of capital writer and I think crypto networks generally often have they have that kind of dynamic, right? And so, I think I would be pretty bullish.
That, you know, I mean, even see that right? With something like Constitution dial, which is kind of crazy, right? How people kind of come together raise so much money for like this thing. So I think we've something I expect from this would be like, Ba, I can most people also. I don't have a good experience. I think, with their cell phone providers, right? They like, I really dislike. I think pretty much all of the ones I've had. Like, yeah.
I'm, it's one of the most interesting things about the space actually is that, like, everyone hates like, the incumbent plate? Like, you can't find anyone that likes like their cell provider or their ISP or their cable provider, or like, you know, whatever, like it's like universally, like every country, just hates these people. Like there's something just sort of built it. Even if the service is really good, you just are sort of like
you're supposed to hate them. And that's sort of what's happened so that it's sort of an interesting position because it makes it easier to sort of get in, right? Like you don't you're not trying to convince people to like abandon something that they love like they hate what they have and they wish they were simple diminutive. And so, you know, it makes it, it makes it just, it's
interesting. It's not a huge part of like the way that we've thought about things, but it's something that I've sort of observed over the years of doing this and it doesn't matter what country you're Oh, do you like everyone
always has the same opinion? So before you were, you know, you talking about decentralizing this backbone and then you know you have or like right now you work with carriers and then maybe you could have new carriers that emerge, you know, I guess just based on the helium network is there but it is the carrier itself something that you can also provide a new decentralized way. It's a great question.
I think so. I mean the hard part of the equation is that like you've got to sort of interact with this blockchain and you got to interact with like tokens and stuff like that. And and you know, the UI, I think we did a pretty good job of like improving the UI for for doing that, you know, like our experience is like pretty good. But you know, I still think you have a hard time when it comes to like things like the Fiat on and off ramps, right?
Like getting into the ecosystem to like pay for things in Tokens and, you know, regulation makes that really hard for like, especially us companies that want to participate in that world, you know, like being a, being a money transmitter or money exchanger is, is really tricky. And so there are there are things to like think about that.
I think make the experience difficulty of like a fully decentralized way, but I think you can get pretty close where you don't really need like a specific entity to be your carrier and especially, you know, Technologies like ECM now also is a big deal, right? Like where you don't need a physical light piece of plastic, any more that goes into your phone. You just scan a QR code, on my calf, on a modern phone and like, you're off and running.
And so, lots of things happening like at the same time that really make this all possible. Now, for the first time, whereas otherwise, it would have been like a nightmare to like, try and tackle it even even just two or three years ago would have been a nightmare, right, but now it's feasible and doable and I think we've already sold something like 20,000 cellular
hotspots already. And so that's that's already starting to That's already starting to spread around the US and I think he's going to start accelerating for the remainder of the year. Amazing. And then while we're at it, what about you know, things like the Broadband or can you do the physical wire networks? Also you my expectation is that like technology is getting bit good enough that you can do away with the cable part completely,
right? So like they're there are now like enough interesting projects. Whether it's like Facebook's Tara graph or theirs. A company called Toronto, for example, that, you know, are sort of working on this part religiously, right? Like, how do I deliver like GB Broadband to the home? Wirelessly in like some cost-effective way, right? Where I don't need, you know, a million transmitters in a city. I need like 50 and, you know, so I think that's going to change
that. Kind of technology is going to change the way we think about, delivering Internet to the, he doesn't need to be a cable like dug under the street. Anymore, right? Like or overhead, it can be done wirelessly now and I'm pretty confident that the technology is like that actually works for that. Right? And so I think if you sort of add the helium model into it, it becomes pretty interesting, right? Because you give like a really interesting economic model for wisps, right?
Like wireless internet service providers and there are some of those already. It's just a difficult Market to be in right now. What's the difference between a wisp in the normalize p.i.? Wisp delivers the internet connection completely wirelessly, right? So, there's no, there's no cable involved. Residence. Similar to like so much like starlink, right? Like, starlink. You're getting it from a satellite, but from a whisper, you're getting it from, like, a transmitter, that's in the same
city, right? Like, it's somewhere nearby and it is connected to the internet with like fiber or something like that. But it, but now the technology is pretty good where it doesn't have to be like a direct line of sight like it. I used to have to be like it can sort of like travel through things. And so it starts to become feasible that you could cover a whole city would like 50 of those devices or 100 of those
devices. And then all of a sudden you don't need to be digging trenches and having cables anymore. You can deliver like GB Broadband to the home with like 50 transmitters in a city, if they're if they're sort of spread out well, and so that kind of stuff is awesome to me because That's like the worst part of the internet ride. Like is that you, you can decentralize all you want at the, a player like at the web 3.
So 2 part, but if you, if you haven't figured out like how to like open access to the internet in the first place. Then you're always stuck with with old business model of like meta data, collection and privacy violations and like advertising, right? Like you can't get away from it until you fix that part of connecting to the internet. So for me personally, like, I'm I'm fascinated by by that part and I think, in general the internet is very hostile towards
privacy stuff. You know, like if you try and use a VPN, I'm like identifying like crosswalks and like, you know, bicycles every 10 seconds on the capture things. And so, you know, just the internet is like not designed for like vpns and like privacy. And so, I'm optimistic that that's going to change over time. And I think decentralizing, like access to the internet itself is a very big and important part of that equation.
Yeah, that's was exactly what. Came up in my mind, when you were speaking before I think, has you. Yeah, that is always one thing, right? Up bothers you sort of, as a Cryptid users are, okay, you can use all those things. But, in some, in some way, it's a feels you're going through is kind of tight, right? Which is connected, which is controlled by, this is P. That like, I don't know who they are. I don't know like what they can do.
And so I think then you have right, you've had a guess, a bunch of projects that You know, I mean things like tour or then you have things like maybe some people working on a decentralized or versions, right?
This is named thing and I don't know what's going on with that now but there was a project called Orchid at some point, but actually, I mean that you're the name thing kind of makes sense to me for that any crypto transaction, but really you want to have the, you know, more fundamental decentralization. I think. So that sounds really amazing. How yeah, it's um, it's one of the these things where like, you know, as I was saying, like there's a bunch of like DV p n
projects. I think like Orchid is one of them and there's like a handful of others and but like I said, like the user experience of using a VPN is just not very good. Like I go to Google and I'm now in like some other country, all of a sudden, right? And like a Google is not useful for me anymore because like Google showed up in Arabic, right? And I'm not using an Arabic keyboard and like, you know what
I mean? And so, and Everywhere You Go, you've got to capture to solve like literally everywhere. And so it's it's just the Experience of using vpns is bad because the internet is bad. Right? Like it depends so much on knowing where you are, where you are and who you are that? Like everything is designed around that those two, those two things.
And so even when you've got stuff like the vpns and the D vpns, it's still not great for consumers, which is why it's not like a huge, not a huge business. The VPN provider, right? Like it's not. Not like, consumers aren't clamoring to like be more private online. And I think part of it is just because It sucks as an experience and part of it is. I think, just because users, just don't care that much yet. But hopefully they, hopefully, they will.
Right. So if you, you know, if helium gets, you know, widespread, you know kind of succeeds mean what one of the issues is also that, in many places. You don't have, you know, kind of open access to the internet, you know, because you have like no firewall or they, they shut down certain, you know, like sometimes he had countries shut down Facebook or social media. Governments, if there are local
people using that too much too. Is this something where you could build a much more kind of censorship resistant Network that, you know, governments can't censor easily. I think it makes it harder. It sort of depends on the, like, level of like censorship, right? I mean, if you know, building internet access using something like helium, makes it much more difficult for someone to shut down, just because there's multiple sort of providers of the internet, right?
Like literally everyone in can become an internet provider, the part that's still easy to shut down. If you're like, a government is, is the sort of main backbone to the internet, right? Like, people still need to connect to the Core internet, somehow. So, you know that, I don't know, it'll be interesting to watch
how that evolves. That's still very much like cables under the ocean kind of, you know, infrastructure like there isn't, there isn't a great way to like, get back to the internet yet, but it's like truly censorship resistant. So, yeah, I mean, I think it improves the situation, but I don't think it like, it's a perfect solution to like, I don't know, like Iran, like turning off, like all access to
the internet or something. Like I don't know that you can really get around that yet, but there's in Interesting stuff. I mean like you could deliver it from the sky, you know, like people like Google was doing this with balloons. And, you know, starlink is obviously not doing it with satellites and it's, you know, there was become much, much harder to like sensor, right? Like I don't like, how are you going to like, stop access to a satellite?
And Riley could have to go around and find every satellite dish and take it out. Right? And so stuff is heading. I think in the right direction where there are more and more options and like helium is one of those tools. I think that will help in that Fight. Pretty sad about this. That is something that's very needed. Yeah, I mean, helium is grown as grown like, like I think what we've seen over the last like two and a half years of helium.
Existing is it's grown from like zero hotspots to like 600 thousand hot spots with another like three million on back order, you know, something like 75% of the u.s. Zip codes has access to helium now and like, you know, it's grown at like an insane Pace, right? And so I think I think what It's shown, is that people want something like this? Like they want some way to like stick it to the incumbent like telcos. They want some way to earn like passive income.
They want some way to like get involved in crypto, you know, like there's a lot of things that came together at the same time to make this interesting for people. And I like I said, I think we did a pretty good job of like making the user interface like easy for people, which was the other part of crypto that I think has traditionally been not very good outside of like centralized services like coinbase and stuff. That's all. Improving, you know, like the wallets are getting better.
Like the apps are getting better, you know, like everything is sort of improving. But yeah, I think helium has done a phenomenal job. It's in, you know, I can't even remember how many countries but thousands of like tens of thousands of cities hundreds of countries, and I expect there to be three or four million hot spots on the network over the next 24 months. One another way that I was sort of like, thinking about helium a little bit. That seemed interesting to me is, you know, Bitcoin.
You can also think of as it's this sort of economic it is incentive system that has bootstrap. Also, you know, kind of deployment of days, you know, physical Network. Whether you have all these miners running this specialized machines, you know, that tend to be maybe more larger facilities, right? Because they took need to get cheaper.
Christie and diseconomies of scale there, but you know, you still have to, you know, massive investment in this, pretty decentralized physical Network. And then here, we actually have sort of the same thing, but with a different characteristic, right? And it seems to be much more geographically distributed and you don't have this kind of you don't have these economies of scale. I think in the same way that you have like, Bitcoin mining. So Yeah, I'm curious. Like what what do you think is
this significance of that? Or like what are some of the possibilities that that opens? Yeah, I mean, one thing that's hard about helium and anything, like it is that unlike Bitcoin, where where, you know, just sheer quantity of minors is good enough, right? Like they could all be in the same place. Even you know, helium has like depends on like very specific like geographic distribution, right? Like a network that's in one city is useful, but it's not as useful as a network that's in
every city or in every country. And so, But there are some economies there. I mean, like, we're all the, all the hot spots on the network are using the same physical. At least components, like, parts of the hotspot are all the same.
So there's some economies of scale that are occurring there because, you know, vendors are all Bonnie similar parts and those parts are getting cheaper, as they get as the volume increases, the supply chain over the last couple of years has not been great, you know, because we because of covid and Chip shortages and like everything, which is affecting like multiple
different. Is. But in general, you know, a lot of the components are shared and I think as we move into cellular like that's even more true. Like a lot of the chips come from like Qualcomm, for example, right? So like every vendor is buying stuff from Qualcomm. And so, you know, you get the same sort of economies of scale that as you would in a more centralized approach because everyone is using like approximately the same kind of hard work. And I mean, all of these hot spots, right?
They also have private key and ncos implicitly wallet. Do you think that wallet? You know, these how do you think I will have like usage beyond the kind of narrow function? It hasn't any heating network and on how do you think that's going to kind of integrate into, you know, people's digital assets and how they manage them. Yeah. It's you know, Hot spots are kind of like nft. He's really right. Like they are they have a private key and they are they are non fault fungible in a way.
Right? Like they have sort of unique locations and and unique characteristics that are different. So I think it's interesting like they're arguably like they're some of the first like physical world like nft s, right? And and that's kind of an interesting idea. But the rest of the wallet management has all has all been done, you know, in the traditional way, right? Like, there's a mobile app. There's a, you know, you can use Ledger like, etc. Etc. So, I don't know.
It's a good question. Actually. I haven't, I don't think we've thought about what you could do at the edge there like that. Knowing that like, there are, you know, three million sort of, private key wallet type things out there that you could probably do something with. I do think we're starting to have the conversation with lots of different projects similar to what you're describing where there's a bunch of like DVP and projects.
For example who are like, okay, we perfect if we could run our VPN software on your Six hundred thousand hot spots because that's, you know, a pretty massive like VPN network. Although all of a sudden, right. So I think there are those kinds of conversations that are sort of obvious where it's like, okay, you've got this massive distributed network of nodes. Like what else could you do with it? Like it's good for a wireless network, but it might also be
good for a bunch of other stuff. And so I think we're going to start to see some like really interesting things come out. But the VPN one is like I said, always been interesting to me because I'm always so interested in privacy and anonymity so that one is always Something that's sort of close to my heart and I would love to figure out a way to like enable some sort of decentralized VPN running on on helium nodes because it's sort of the perfect distribution of hardware for it.
I would love it. If you could, maybe dive a little bit more deeply into, you know, kind of like this idiom Network. And like, how does the network look like? So, you know, you've talked about the wireless network, right? And then you have to, you know, the cellular network right way. She said, you know, different devices. So can you talk a bit about, you know, what is the architecture of the human Network? You know, what are the different domain? Of participants in the system
and what are their roles? Yeah, so there's I mean I think a few different ways to think about it. So at its core, you know, helium is a layer 1 Block Chain. So it's a completely sort of from scratch written blockchain Network that doesn't build on top of anything else. And most of that is because we started this in 2016 or 2017 and there really wasn't a lot to use back then.
Like you're either were building on top of a theorem which was which we thought was going to be too expensive, even back then or you were Forking Bitcoin or, you know, doing something like that. And so we build something from scratch. So at its core, it's sort of a layer one, like proof of stake. Blockchain. There's 3,500 validators. Who are responsible for like, block, production, transaction,
verification and validation. They stake, 10,000 H and T, which is the H. And T is the sort of native token on on helium. So something like 35, 40 % of the supply of H and T is staked in validators. Who run the network and then you've got the hot spot hosts themselves. And I think the best way of thinking about hotspots as they're kind of like a combination of a crypto Miner and a wireless access point.
Basically, like it's a it's a sort of Dual Purpose device and the crypto mining part is done through an algorithm that we call proof of coverage. And so it's, you know, we wanted to try and really the problem that we're trying to solve was like, how do you build the network at the star drive? Because there are a lot of devices to use the network. Work yet when you're when you're building and if there are none.
So you've got to kind of build it first and figure out how to build it and in the physical world application. Like the hard part is like, how do you prove that? There's actually any hardware? And like, how do you prove that? Any of it is real. Like, how does the blockchain know that there's real, There's real access points out there.
So we built this algorithm called proof of coverage where hotspots transmit these encrypted data packets, wirelessly and the range of a hotspot is extremely large. Grates on the order of the worst case. It's about a mile and in the best case. It's like a hundred miles, you know, these hot spots transmit. This is sort of encrypted data back and forth with each other, like the sort of challenge protocol and the hotspots earn hnt for this this work that they do, right?
Like the sort of proof of coverage is the equivalent of our of proof of work in Bitcoin, or something, in our, in our world and the hot spots are rewarded differently, right? So if you're creating like a big coverage area, you know, for hundreds of miles because you you're on top of A cell tower or something. Then you earn more than someone who just has it in their window home, you know, because you're trying to build a build a network.
And so that's sort of the those are the two sort of host characteristics of the, of the network. And then the other side is users, which are, which are people actually using the network.
And so, those those today are mostly companies and so their companies like Salesforce and Volvo and Costco and Toyota and like companies that actually run sensors on the helium network are the other sort of participant in the network and they They have to spend each and T in order to actually use the network or it and that, that money goes to the that agency goes to the to the hotspot hosts for those are, you know, those are sort of the main three actors, you've got like
validators, hotspot, hosts and users are really like the three characteristics in the system. And then when you start to think about like other types of wireless network, it will work this, the kind of the same way. Right? Like, you'll have cellular hotspots that participate in cellular proof of coverage. And then their cellular users, which will be, you know, mobile phone. On people mobile phone networks, you know, things like that.
So every type of wireless network will have it the same sort of characteristics where they're sort of someone on the supply side like the host. And then there's someone on the demand side, which will be two users and it sort of will depend on the type of network as the like who those people are. Proof of coverage, are there. You know, how secure is this? Are they like attack scenarios that somebody can spoof things and trick hotspots. Yeah. I mean, it's an ongoing amount of work, right?
I mean, as hnt is become valuable in the network has become valuable, you know, like the attack surface is increased. Right? Like people have figured out ways to sort of trick the system or take advantage of like characteristics of the system that were Either like bugs in the first place or just things that we didn't think about at the time or just really sort of characteristics of the fact that the network has sort of evolved and gotten big and valuable.
So like one example, we, you know, we just are in the process of like fixing this thing where if you happen to have like a lot of hot spots offline near your hot spot, then you get challenged in proof of coverage more than you should. And so people have figured this out and you know, have started to take advantage of the fact that like if they can find like a spot with Like a bunch of offline hot spots, they can put their hot spot there and like make a bunch more money.
And so, you know, you're constantly it's a very big and complicated project. Like there's a lot of pieces, all of them are built from scratch For Better or For Worse. And so, you know, it's a constantly sort of evolving process to sort of find these problems and improve them and fix them and sort of think about the future of it all. And I think one of the great thing that's happened is that the helium Community has gotten bigger and more active, right?
So a lot of this Comes from the community itself rather than from the core development team and I think ultimately what you want. Right? Like with the project at this scale like you want a very active and involved community and that's, you know, that's kind of what we've ended up with. So, so, yeah, it's certainly not perfect but by any means, but it's heading in the right direction. And then you see this as kind of like 16.
So for example, AT&T you would use that same token for the wireless network and for the cellular network, and it's basically like a single token. Yeah. I mean, we're right now this there's sort of two tokens really in the system, right? There's there's hnt which is the main token that you earn for being a hotspot host. It's the thing that you see, you know, being being exchanged.
But if you want to use the network, there's Second token called the data credit and that's kind of like a stable coin of some kind, right? Like it. It is fixed in value relative to the dollar. Right? So it's always point zero, zero, zero, zero one dollars and the nice thing about that system is that it's very predictable and cost. In terms of how you use the network.
Like it's always going to cost you the same amount of like US Dollars. And the way that you acquire data credits is by destroying hnt, right. So, if you want H, if you want data, The credits, you have to take H and T and like burn it and the ratio of that changes, right? Because ancient he's value is
fluctuating. And so, you know, depending on how much AT&T is worth, when you burn one hnt, you end up with a different amount of data credits, depending on what the value of H and T is at the time, but it's a neat system because it solves, one of the biggest problems for like utility networks, which is how do you make it predictable for users? Right? Like if you, if you use the actual like native token, and the value of the Native token is
like fluctuating wildly. You know, one day it might cost you like a dollar to use the network and the next day it might cost you like a hundred dollars, right? And so we had to figure out a way to like make it stable and predictable and and having data credits kind of act as a stable
coin was was the way to do that. So it's a really neat system and it's worked well because it reminds people of like cell phone minutes or airline miles or like something that they're something that they're really used to. I think we have this system right in the end. The interesting amazing thing, right? Is also that you have this, you know, the essentially owned Network. So, of course, at that point, you know, governance also becomes interesting.
So how do you how this agent T. How does the network governance work today? And how do you see that evolving in the future? So there is a sort of improvement proposal process that we borrowed from Bitcoin called the hip. And today, pretty much anyone can create a hip, right? Like, you can sort of propose, whatever, whatever it is that you want. And there's a voting process that is weighted using H and T. So people vote on whether they like these proposals or not.
There's a lot, there's heat, there's many, proposals for like, how to improve the proposal process or like the proposal process should be. The governance process should be different. The voting process should be different. Like everyone has their own opinion about how this should work. And I think, you know, helium is somewhat unique in that. It has sort of a different set of constituents than traditional Block Chain networks. And so that poses like a
different kind of challenge. But yeah, I mean again, I don't, I'm not, I don't think any Block Chain network has figured out governance. It's at all, like, in any reasonable way. Right? Like, if you look at Bitcoin core, it's kind of like gate kept by. Whoever the Bitcoin core like me. Tributaries are and GitHub and the serum Foundation kind of decides what to do with the
theory. Mm, and you know, the coins that use like weighted Stakes, like are dominated by whales who own all the currency, you know, so none of it is like perfect but there's the again a lot of like really good suggestions and on a lot of good proposals on like how to improve the governance. But but today it's sort of the steak waited process and we've actually had a lot of like, great Improvement. Proposals come through the community.
That have been implemented. I think we're starting to go hard now. Is that the complexity of like actually writing the code is quite high. So to implement any of these changes like takes a lot of like engineering work and so the sort of Engineering Group or the engineering side of the community needs to grow as well. Otherwise, you just sort of passing proposals that can't believe can be implemented because there's no one, you know, there's no one who has the bandwidth to implement them.
And so that's sort of the next evolution of helium. I think is that the engineering side of the community will need to grow. And actually, start participating, in, in writing code against the project. Yeah, that is also I think a hard thing to do in this kind of decentralized, right? Where even today I'm in most blockchains, you tend to have you know, and Main development team that kind of toss the work. Yeah, definitely can be a
challenge, right. When there's a disconnect between proposals people make and then you know, the team that actually builds stuff. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, it's an interesting problem, right? Because you The team can only do so much, right? And so, we have like a core development team already has like a very massive backlog of like major issues and problems and improvements that it's working on.
And so while it's great for people to make proposals on improvements that they want to see, you know, it's always, it's not always reasonable to expect that. The core development team is just going to shift their priorities to like work on that proposal, right? And again, I think every every project has this problem until the engineering community. Leti for that project gets big
enough, right? And then and then, the problem starts to get solved because there's enough, like, engineering resources to, like, actually work on this stuff. But, yeah, I mean, not sure what to really say about it or do about it other than to continue to like try and Foster more of that, like that the helium Foundation, or the actually has a bunch of Grant sort of open for this kind of stuff. So there's, you know, incentive for people to start doing some
of this work. But, yeah, I mean, Engineers always hard to come by and, you know, the best ones are usually busy. Something. So trying to sort of attract them to new projects is always a challenge. I mean, to be honest. I don't think there's any Block Chain that has sort of figured that out right because in the end you have that Bitcoin each area where this actually isn't that kind of proposal process and then so I don't think there's any blockchain where
you're at the stage. I mean, it's also coordination problem of like, you know, how can you get potentially a decentralized governance like, you know, manage software development. Yeah, and it's hard. I mean I think Bitcoin has this problem like in a severe way,
right? Like there's no there's no like if you're a distributed system / blockchain engineer your highly incentivized to go work on like Solano or Avalanche or polka dot or you know, because those guys have like, massive treasuries are going to pay a lot of money to go to go do it. Whereas Bitcoin doesn't really have that built-in right? Like there's no real Financial incentive to work on bitcoin and Makes it hard if people have bills to pay and like lives to
live. And, you know, you can't just work on on, on Good Vibes, you know, it's like, these people happen to, like, make money. And that that's, that's a challenge. I think in all of these systems, and mostly I've seen it solved through like grants, you know, so like, they'll be specific problems that a project is looking to solve and like, will offer a sort of a grant, in order to solve that problem and that hopefully, that sort of Spurs the ecosystem. But yeah, I agree with you.
I think it's generally like an Solved problem. And like the core engineering team is sort of always the core engineering team. But yeah, I hope I'm hoping that will change over time because it's the only way that these things really will scale. Like you can't depend on a single team. It's just, it's too much work and too fragmented. And is there also a kind of community pool or, you know, mechanism where the community uses governance to directly from work?
We don't really have that today, but it's something that I would definitely like to see. And I think there are some good examples of other other projects that have done a good job of that. And so, yeah, I would love to see see more of that going forward. But today, the, the sort of Grants are managed by the foundation team, and they sort of decide how that goes and take input from the community on, on how to do it. And how do you think about the interoperability?
So, do you see helium? Yeah, how do you see it? Interoperating with all the blockchain. So the smart contract ecosystems. Yeah, it's a thing that I wish was it's one of the downsides of building your own own thing, you know, like in. And at the time, I don't think there was a lot of alternative, like we sort of, have to do it that way. But I would love for hnt to be sort of a participant in like the defy ecosystem, for example, and that's not really happening
today. And so there are a few groups working on Bridges and wormholes to other chains. So, there's there's a group working on an Al Gore and one as a group, working in a Salon 01. I'd love to see something on ethereum. So I liked it bridging approach. I mean there's obviously been a few hacks and and attacks on the bridges over the years, which makes sense.
They're like high-profile with a lot of money and we'll see it, you know, over time, you know, maybe the sort of LED your part of helium moves to some existing layer one. And, you know, the delete the layer to sort of remain on helium as their own sort of miniature blockchains, like, there's a proposal like that in the community right now, so we'll see. But I think it's highly valuable for H and D to be to be part of that greater ecosystem and part of that broader ecosystem. For sure.
Yeah, and I think that will fix a, you think of something like this buying buying Spectrum idea, right? I mean in essence that's like a huge financial transaction and then, I think if you can do that, so as part of this crypto Financial system that will, you know, unlock a lot of probably possibilities that, you know, you can't have if you're if you you don't have those connections. It's a challenge for sure. I mean, it's it again. It's one of those like problems, right?
Like where everyone is sort of building their own blockchain with their own community. And you know, the sort of bridging is supposed to be the solution to that. I think, you know, what's hard still, is that none of the smart contract. Block teams are really capable of doing something quite as complicated, as helium as a layer 2 or sort of on top of the, of those networks. I could just too much State and like, too much, too much stuff, too. To try and manage.
So I think that's part of what makes it difficult is that, you know, you'd have to figure out some sort of combination where, like, you know, you still have validators like running the network, but The Ledger is on a different is on the different chain or something like that, you know, we're looking into that kind of stuff and like I said, there's a few proposals in the community about how how we might want to do that.
So, yeah, it's something I'm personally quite excited to like, figure out how to do, but I think for now, like, it would probably be a bridge or a wormhole or like some, you know, some equivalent like I would be the best way to like make it happen quickly. Yeah, I mean, I think that would
be a fine solution. Oh, yeah, you have things like ax law and Wormhole and I think they were fairly easily connect helium to, you know, all the all the block chains and I think it will be the best solution probably or you have things like iidc but that's more work to implement think. Yeah for sure. I'm in India also see like enabling the deployment of smart contracts. Cleon helium as a Direction. It's possible.
I mean there's a proposal in the community right now to sort of basically have helium be sort of a network of networks right? Where there's lots of different types of wireless network that live outside of the second layer. And so how that's implemented. I think remains to be seen but I could see it. I could see it being possible. But I think the purpose of the smart contracts would have to be
like quite precise. Like, I don't think there's a whole lot of value and helium trying to be like another smart. Contract blockchain is already like so many of them that that are focused just on doing that. Then we'll certainly do it
better than we could. So I think if they were smart contracts would have to be like specific to a purpose, like deploying wireless networks, or deploying networks or deploying like distributed applications, like that that are networking related or something very specific to like this sort of purpose of what helium is. Otherwise, I think you're in danger of just being another like Just like it. Like I oh too. Kind of reminds me of that. Right? Like now it's sort of like
another is the back. It's like an avalanche clone now and they don't really know what distinguishes, something like IO different Avalanche. And so I think you got to be a little bit careful about trying to just do it all because there's already, you know, there's already people that are already doing that. I'm going to do a better job than we could. Yeah, that's that's a tricky. I think that's a sort of tricky balance. I mean II can, I've worked a lot in the cosmos ecosystem and
there. I think there's also a lot. Of this that kind of balance, right? We have like you launch a chain and then he has certain functionality and then, you know, maybe some people want to add things to the chain and then there's a question of case. This is like a governance process, which makes it very hard to innovate. Or if it becomes like a general, smart contract thing, then it again, has it comes away.
Maybe a bit from this being very purpose, specific and maybe also will have, you know, issues in terms of performance, right? If there's too much other stuff running on there. Yeah, it's just you know, it's just it's not a problem that like helium is focused on like we're here to like help build Network infrastructure in the decentralized way and not for like minting and ftes or like building some sort of defy platform or something. Right? Like there's already so many places to do that.
And so I think to me, that would be, you know, if we went down the smart contract path, like that, would, that would sort of, we need to be its focus. What are the biggest challenges that you see in the future? Yeah, it's good question. I mean, I think the thing that I probably worried about the most in the short term is is you know, as we add more wireless network. So things like cellular and
Wi-Fi and stuff. Like making sure that the incentive model is like good enough, you know, because you're going to start like Distributing hnt across like multiple different types of network. And so it's going to start getting more diluted than it is today where it's, you know, sort of whole going to a single type of network. And so that's going to be an interesting type of challenge, right? Like as, as the 5G Network grows, you know, it's going to be taking away rewards from the
iot network, right? And so there's going to be a little bit of competition like among networks, which may be good. But may also be bad and so not exactly sure how that's going to go. But that's that's definitely a concern that I have is a lot of technical challenges that will face.
I mean, I think helium is already the largest peer-to-peer Network that has ever been built and it's like 600,000 nodes on a On a peer-to-peer Network. Like all the time is, I think the largest ever and so there are all sorts of engineering challenges that come with that, that really only have been solved in theory. You know, like there's a lot of theoretical writing about peer-to-peer networks at this size. Not that many have actually done it. And so there's that kind of
stuff. I think we have the right road map already to sort of mitigate a lot of that. But you know just dealing with something at this scale is is a huge undertaking. I think we've started something. Five billion requests to the, to the API server over the last
month or something like that. And so, you know, it's had a large scale where like scaling problem has become real, especially, especially, scaling problems, that don't have like, well known solutions that I think scaling web applications is quite well. Understood scaling like peer-to-peer networks is not really well understood. And so there are you know, there just are challenges there that we're facing and working through. But overall. I think I worry about them less
than Economic challenges. Yeah, I think I can see that as being a hard problem. Right? Because in the end you're sort of using the expectation of the future returns, maybe of the different networks to pay now, but, you know, you don't know what those are like, can you like, what's the usage today? You know, are how much sort of Cabo, you know how much business those the network do in terms of, you know, packages. It's selling to sensors or other
users. Yeah, I mean II think, you know, on the sensor side, one of the challenges, I think, with iot in general, is that like the market for you hasn't really existed properly, because there really hasn't been any network for iot stuff to really use like, on a broad scale. Like most people who have sort of operated in iot have done it like in the confines of like they're building or in the warehouse or like, you know what I mean?
And so that they haven't really been many applications where you assume that there was a network that was kind of like, Like a cell network or a mobile network. And so, you kind of like the hard part about helium in the iot space is that you're sort of bootstrapping both sides of the
network at the same time. Like you're trying to build like a big coverage Network and then you're also trying to like, get people who are interested in iot or have problems or have like applications to start building them and everything. When when Hardware is involved, is slow, right, liked it for someone to build a sensor application to build a hundred thousand sensors. For example, is Always going to be like, an 18 month job. Right?
Like there's really not, at least, not from what I've seen. Like, there's not a way to like shortcut that that length of time because you've got to like, you know, test the thing and certify it and you know, there's just so many steps required to like actually make something work and then manufacture it. So that part is tricky. And so with the cellular network, you don't have the same problem.
We have a slightly different problem, but there's a lot of end users and there's a lot of known applications like, you know, there's multiple billion cell phones out there, right? And So, you kind of know who your users are. You don't have the same problem? You have a customer acquisition problem, but it's a different, you know, different type of problem than you have in the OT universe. And so, yeah, so so it's, you know, it's definitely.
It's definitely a challenge that requires a lot of patience because you've got to sort of everyone involved in helium has to sort of understand that the iot side of the network is going to take years in order for real usage to come because real usage is going to require Manufacturing. Lots and lots of sensors and just that process alone is always going to be like a couple of years long. Even once the problem is identified and solution tested
and everything else. So yeah, it's slow and I you know, I think that's a part that I wish we knew how to make it go faster, but I'm not convinced that there is not convinced that there is actually a way. So you talked a little bit about privacy, but I would be curious about privacy specifically with regards to like iot, I mean, and some level that You know, seems a little bit scary to, right? Because if I serve already not
so good. And then you also have like, you know, a lot more devices that are giving away, lots more data continuously. Do you think it will be possible to have, you know, iot widely adopted, while you know maintaining or maybe even improving people's privacy. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think the Privacy concern is different than sort of the big internet privacy concern. Liked it to me.
The big internet privacy concern is more like, you know, an ISP knows my browsing history and you know, no sort of everything that I do on the internet at least at some level. There's definitely potential for a concern in the iot space or like you have a lot of sensors all over the place. They could, for sure could be used maliciously. But that the sort of approach is a little bit different, right? Like it's not you're not really connected to the internet in the
same way. But yeah, I mean, I think, I think we always have to be calling some of the fact that like there's danger there, like people could track people without without their consent. So I think people have really started to do that with like are tags, for example, rightly. They drop them in people's purses or in their car or whatever. And all of a sudden you have like a tracking device on someone that they don't know is
there. And so I think you've always got to be worried about that kind of stuff, but it's probably not necessarily unique to iot. Look, thanks for watching mirror. It's been really, really great to hear about UV mapping and he's like, just an amazing
accomplishment. I think to build this like, you know, physical crypto controlled Network out and and I'm I'm really excited about it. Like all the things that would become possible with it. I think also that the intersection between crypto applications and, you know, having a dis physical Network. I think will be very powerful. So yeah. Thanks so much for coming on to me. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
I'm glad you're interested and excited about what helium is doing and super excited to see to see what comes next. Cool. And thanks so much for your, thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find And subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify, YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcast. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast, go to
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