Helium Mobile will Change Wireless Networks Forever as the Top DePin Project with Amir Haleem

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your professional background?

games all day, but it is brutal. You just got this like sheet of like here's eight hundred known bugs, you know, like recreate them, and some of them are involved. You've got to play like four hours into the game or something just to get to the to the bug. So that's actually a much harder job than I thought than I thought. And then I was a software engineer, worked in design game design rather than than graphic design,

worked on stuff like Battlefield nineteen forty two. I used to also play video games professionally, was another thing in my past life. So I was a Quake and Quake three and Unreal Tournament champion, and that was cool. I mean, I met a lot of really good people and a lot of you know, a lot of interesting companies and sponsors in the space. And this was a long time ago, this sort of late nineties, before before video gaming was

really or pro gaming was really a thing. But that's kind of how I strangely, that's how I ended up in Helium is that I met Sean Fanning, who was the co founder of Napster, in that video game journey, like he was a big Quake player and a big World of Warcraft player. Pats crossed and we ended up staying in touch and ended up founding Helium together many many years later. So it all it all works out in the end, but the path was was definitely windy and strange in hindsight.

on Solana. You know, I've kept track of it. My skepticism around gaming on on in the Web three world has always been that having worked for and like knowing these companies really well, like EA, there is no way they're going to give up ownership of their ip that way, like they're going to like try and build their own

layer one or layer two or something. It would be my I shouldn't say with such certainty, My expectation would be that like that's what they would want to do rather than building on Solana or you know, Bay or whatever. And so that's where my skepticism kind of creeps in, is that, like all of the value really lives in

the game itself. You know, so if you thought about World of Warcraft trading items and gold and stuff like that, and I can't see those guys being interested in like moving any part of that value chain away from them. But we'll see. I mean, I think it's you know, there's been a lot of hatred I think in the gaming space towards crypto, and that primarily comes from the

old days of GPU shortages. You know, gamers couldn't get hold of GPUs at reasonable prices because everyone was trying to buy them to mine ethereum or you know whatever they were doing. And I think that created a lot of conflict between the two universes. But we'll see. I hope it's something that takes off, because to me, it's something that makes logical sense, and having spent a lot of time in that world, I can totally see how they would crossover. But today I haven't thought about it.

I've just been focused on Helium and most of the stuff I spent time on in the Deep in the deep in universe, rather than.

got popular. The idea of like trading items and people paying for items, and you know, like that that felt like somewhere between EverQuest and World of Warcraft is like where that concept became real, and it's not you know, it's not it's not clear to me yet what value there is in taking it outside of the game itself, right, because I can't do anything with the World of Warcraft sword or whatever outside of World of Warcraft, right, Like maybe I can have it as a PfP or something,

but I don't know if that's you know, I don't know if that's valuable enough. So I think that's a little bit of the challenge right now. Is like a lot of the solutions are solutions searching for a problem basically, right, and like can we apply that? Can we apply web three to like X thing? And a lot of times

I'm not sure that that makes sense. And I think the item idea is like a decent one, Like unless there's interoperability of currency and items and stuff between games, then I'm not sure there's a ton of value in like just putting those things on chain, right, because there's nothing to do with it on chain. I can only use it inside its game, right, And so I think that's going to be an interesting thing to watch it.

It's not a new concept or a new probably this is like way before web three, like this idea has existed. Steam is kind of an example of trying to create sort of a cross platform thing that is useful, and it has been, but that's been you know, it's become more of like a game library or a game marketplace rather than an in app kind of experience. So yeah, I don't know. I'm curious to see, but I am

definitely skeptical and a bit wary. And by the way, this is, this is why I think it's generally a bad idea for people who come from the space to be the ones trying to pioneer the disruption in web three is that you know all the reasons why it shouldn't work, and it is better if someone that just comes in who quite frankly, is kind of clueless about it and just sort of forces it to work. And I think that's actually what happened with Helium and us because we didn't come from like a wireless or a

telecom background. We just like it should just work this way, right, And you know, you kind of need a little bit of that cluelessness sometimes because you know where all the pitfalls are if you've spent too much time in some of these industries.

It's just it is they can't think that way, and it's because they've spent so much time in like the regulation and you know all the stuff that comes with the with that world, and so you know, as much as I know about gaming, which is a little bit old now, I think I would also be totally the wrong person to like try and approach that problem, just because I know so much about it, and I think that generally can work against you.

your first encounter with bitcoin or maybe etherorem or blockchain, What was your aha moment and you know what led to integrating that into a helium.

it was interesting at all. Right, And and you know, we used to joke in the early days with that particular employee about maybe we should put bitcoin a six inside you know, hotspots. And this is before Helium was even a Web three crypto thing at all. We were just trying to think of ways to incentivize people to like go deploy these you know what ended up being called the hotspot. But we were trying to create any

incentive we could think of for that to happen. And it really wasn't honestly, and I think I've said this on another podcasts and stuff. It wasn't really until file Coin that I really was like, Okay, this actually really is kind of cool, right, because you are you sort of devised the system in Filecoin's case, like they're trying to prove that you were storing, that you were making

file storage available, or that you were storing files. And it was the first time that I had seen like a credible let's say, a credible team, right, like they had already been doing that kind of work for a very long time, proposed something that I thought made sense and sort of the use the thing that the network needed as the work. Right. So rather than like hashing or you know, using GPUs or whatever, you were making file storage available, right, And it's a file storage network, right.

And that was the first time that I had seen that. There were other file storage networks before filecoin, like CIA or siah and storage and others that I have great respect for, but their work was still hashing, and that was like orthogonal to the problem, right, And it was just sort of a way to like, you know, cause there to be some work in order for rewards to exist. So file coin was the first time I was like, Okay, that's really clever. And then and then we started we slash.

I started to like go down this rabbit hole of like, okay, well, what if we could revisit the concepts of like using that as an incentive to like go build wordless networks, right, Like, how could we how could we cause the network to exist?

Which is I think the genius of Bitcoin and file coin and others is that they have invented the bootstrapping system basically, right where the earliest participants in the network, the miners, earned something, right even though the network isn't being used and it's new, and you know, like you have to solve that chicken egg problem somewhere. And that

was what I thought was genius about it. And obviously we borrowed, slash copied heavily from from everything that had come before us when we were designing Helium, and I think ended up being I think very successful as a way to like bootstrap wireless networks.

file sharing network. But I think what it proved was like that's actually what people wanted, right, Like they want to be able to like you seem too young. But if you remember, at the time, the only way to like get a single song was to like buy the whole album, right, and like that was like, honestly, the biggest shift with Napster was like I just want that one song and I would even pay for it, but there's no way for me to pay for it, so

I'm just gonna steal it. Basically was the way that worked, and I think that led to what ultimately was iTunes and everything else, because that was the unlocked was like I just want that song, right, and it should be easy for me to acquire it. And web three stuff

is I think a little bit like that. It is all you know, it's all user created and all sort of lives in this public domain, and I think that is such a radical change from what had happened in the past, and things like Napster and bit torrent after it, and everything that sort of came came that way. I thought it was sort of I don't know, almost prepared the public for like what that feels like, you know, like to have these sort of publicly distributed networks, and

I I love that part. I think it's fascinating.

how did this idea come about, what was the mission and how has that mission evolved over the years.

sensors basically, right. We had friends that were building hardware startups that likes sensor companies, but basically and they had no way of like getting their devices connected to the internet, Like you either had to use Bluetooth, but in a lot of cases that wouldn't work just because of what they were trying to build, like they wouldn't be any phones nearby. Wi Fi had the problem of like, hey, well, how do you authenticate to all these different worldless networks?

And like how do I make it seamless? Cellular was really really expensive at the time and you know, very very power intensive, and so that was sort of the genesis thought was like, Okay, well, why is there supposed to be this like blow up of Internet of things, you know, IoT stuff, but there doesn't seem to be a network that would actually support those devices. And so

that that was our sort of original thought. And because we had friends working in that universe, we we sort of understood the problem at some level and thought we actually had our first set of customers in those friends. It took a long time, though, like we had not solved in any way the how do you build a wireless network? Park Like we had built the technology, like so we had built an interesting, low power wordless protocol, but the problem remained of like, oh, well how do

I how do I build a big wireless network? Or like how do I get thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of these things deployed? And I you know, it wasn't really until we started dabbling in crypto like years later that we even thought about finding a solution to found a reasonable solution to that problem. We spent a lot of time, you know, building products for like healthcare and like restaurants, and you know, we started to

we tried to think of it that way. It was like, okay, if we got every restaurant to like install these helium sensors and devices, then you would end up with the big coverage network that way. But it's a very very very slow and kind of painful grind and to some degree like not a thing that at least for myself, but I think for a lot of the team also

not that interesting. You know that we came from like the sort of protocol background of like wanting to build distributed systems and change the world in some way, and instead we were building you know, sensor solutions for restaurants, which is a perfectly fine business. It just wasn't what we wanted to do and what I wanted to do. So I think when we when we read the file coin white paper, like I literally just ninety degree turned

the company. At that point, I was like I don't even want to do what we were doing anymore, like we should do this right. And that was an interesting period of time. It was a lot of intense conversations with investors and the board because crypto was still pretty new and still very cowboy ish. I can't tell if

that's gotten better, honestly, but so it was. You know, it was kind of a radical idea to like abandon a business plan that was kind of working but slowly, and go chase off some other crazy, you know thing. But that's kind of the That was sort of the evolution is that we struggled for a long time to figure out how to get the sort of technology for

IoT that we had built deployed at scale. And then when we discovered file coin, that kind of set us down the path of what became things like proof of coverage and hotspots and wrote the first white paper in twenty eighteen, and that was sort of the start of out of Helium's crypto journey, I guess.

very proud. Like I think that that's an awesome thing to have been part of, and I hope to like watch it evolve and participate in the evolution, whether with Helium or as an investor in other stuff, you know, to the extent that I can. Oh.

then you switched to Salona. Tell us about that and the whole strategy behind that.

kind of the way I'd mentioned earlier. The problem is there's no there are no users of your network yet because your network doesn't exist, and so you have to create some kind of reason or incentive for people to deploy these hotspots absent there being customers and usage and money on the on the other side. And that's what

that was. I think really Bitcoin's greatest invention with this concept of mining, right right was like I'm going to do some work, and I'm going to get rewarded in tokens, coins like currency or whatever for doing that work, regardless of whether there's actually any users of the network or not. Right like in the early days of bitcoin, you know, you're just mining empty blocks for the for the most part, right Like, there aren't transactions, There aren't substantial transaction fees.

There's no revenue for you right as a minor, and you know, earning the genesis or the coin based rewards sorry in bitcoin, is your reward, right, And so we we knew that that's what we wanted to do at the time. Really only ethereum existed that would have made any kind of sense for us to There were other st I mean, EOS was kind of a round ish sort of you know, there was other stuff that we

could have used. Ethereum we thought was the only one that was reasonable as an idea, but I think, you know, we would have had to have built what is now thought of as an L two basically, right, We would had to have built an entire blockchain basically on top of Ethereum in order to be able to do what we want, just because we have so many transactions and like so much stuff going on. It would be too expensive, and in hindsight, you know, maybe an L two would

have been the right thing to do. I don't know. What was clear was that we needed to build something because doing it on Ethereum directly was not going to work. And so that's where we you know, our team at the time had a pretty deep background in building distributed systems, Like a bunch of the guys on the team had worked on the back end for Apple's eye message for example,

which is like a gigantic like distributed systems problem. So we thought we knew how to like tackle that problem and to some degree we did, right, Like, we built an l one that was pretty good. It was sort of unique in that it didn't have validators. Like all of the blockchain ran on these little hotspots, which at the time we thought was super important, like we wanted to sort of maximize decentralization, but I think it was you know, it ended up being a lot of work

to maintain. As the network scaled at the speed that it did, it became ever harder and perhaps impossible to like keep running the blockchain on these like miniature little devices that were like raspberry pies, which again I'm like, I amazed that we got that to work at all, but it just became like an impossible burden and started to it started to make it harder to scale in terms of users because it became so much harder for the network to work, and there were outages all the time,

and there are problems, and people had to open their fireworlds for peer to peer connection, you know, just it became complicated to be an operator of a hotspot, which was the opposite of what we wanted, right. We wanted to make it as simple as possible. So we had known the Solana guys for a very long time. Our CTO had worked with Anatolely back in the qualcom days. Anatotally the founder of Solana or one of the founders.

We tried to hire Anatolely to work on Helium, but he had already sort of sele and was, you know, working on this proof of history thing. But it was too early at the time, like Solana was like roughly in the same stage of development that Helium was, and so we couldn't really hitch our wag into something that was also in development and also hadn't launched and also would have bugs and also you know what I mean, like we wanted to control our desks a little bit better.

But over time, as Solana started to succeed and started to get adopted and you know, a DeFi ecosystem started to form, and exchanges started to support SPL tokens and

wallets started to support SPL tokens. You know, it's a lot of work to try and go to every single exchange or every single wallet you know provider and say like, hey, add support for this you know, custom l one that only works for us, right, and it made it very difficult for us to get adoption on exchanges or wallets or really anything, and certainly there was no DeFi ecosystem or anything like that that existed. All that was happening

in telegram. So once Solana got to that point, I was like, it makes no sense not to switch as far as I'm concerned, right, like, because we own a wireless telecom company at the end of the day, and having to like build and maintain our own blockchain, which is something like we had to do rather than something that we thought really added a lot of value to what we were what we were building.

for the folks who are listening, who may this is maybe all new to them. What's kind of your elevator pitched, you know as to what is helium at how they can leverage it?

that right. Like, it's an industry that historically has been gate kept by money regulation, and Helium I think really the first to sort of blow it open in a reasonable way right where you or I or anyone can operate a miniature cell tower but basically in our house or in our business, and we will make money every time someone connects to that cell to out right, and like so anytime someone is nearby watching Netflix or whatever they're doing, you are getting paid every time the user

is doing that right, and that at the highest level is what is what Helium is all about. We've done these deals as you've seen with you know, T Mobile, AT and T Telefonica. There are others that we haven't announced yet, and they are you know, effectively a way for for example, AT and T subscribers to automatically use Helium. Right, so if you're an AT and T user, there's no affirmative action that you have to take. You don't have to find the Helium network and join it. You don't

have to do anything. Your phone will authenticate with Helium using it simcard and automatically join and automatically connect and start sending data through the Helium network whenever it's available because it's cheaper. It's cheaper for AT and T to

do it. That way, we can create coverage in places where AT and T can't really reasonably go and do it, right, Like they're not going to go and deploy a you know, small cell or cell tower or something in a Starbucks, right, and so you know, so that's where Helium sort of fits.

Like over time, what we see now is almost ninety percent of cell phone traffic, you know, at least in the United States, it's happening indoors, right, And so it's less about building like cell tower infrastructure outdoors, you know, which is still very expensive and very difficult business to participate in, but much more about capturing people that are indoors that may not have good service already or knee

cheaper options or whatever it may be. But it's mostly a coverage game indoors, right, Like, there are plenty of places that I'm sure you go to and that I go to that have poor cell service inside, right, and this Helium is a great way of solving that problem and also allows for the operator to make money at the same time, whether that's the business owner or someone independent. We also run Helium Mobile, which is a cell phone service that uses Helium. It uses both Helium and T Mobile.

So you could think of Helium Mobile as equivalent to you know, Mint Mobile or Boost or like you know, any of those sort of prepaid cell phone plans that you can buy, except for the fact that firstly there's a plan which is completely free, and secondly uses a combination of Helium and T Mobile to provide the network coverage, rather than something like Mint which would only use T Mobile's network and sort of be stuck with their pricing.

So that's you know, Helium sort of has two ends, the network building side and then the Heliumobile the subscribers service on the other side.

about earning crypto. As soon as the crypto price changes, they're like up in arms and like, you know, like can't stand it, or if they earned less than they did yesterday or whatever, it's a disaster. And so you know it it also, you know, anytime you have these kind of incentives, whether it's in crypto or not, you get everyone trying to game the system somehow, and that is like just taken to the to the nth degree

when it comes to crypto. And so that was the first version of Heliumobile is like let's make it a compare plan. It's going to be like twenty bucks a month unlimited, but you're also going to earn crypto if

you if you do this thing called discovery mapping. And what discovery mapping is is, as part of the Helium Mobile app on your phone, every time you sort of are wandering around about your day, you're sort of reporting back to us or to the Helium network what the cell service looks like in the area that you're in, and we can use that data to say like, okay, there's dead spots here, right or these are areas where people are spending a lot of time or there's a

lot of foot traffic, and you can sort of using it as a network planning tool basically. Right, you can say, like there's a ton of people that are always here, right, like if there was if there was a hot spot here, you would be capturing you know, like a ton of use, you know, a ton of usage from this group of people. Or we know that there's no cell phone coverage in the Stomer books over there, Like if someone were to go put a hot spot in there, you know, they

would also capture a lot of traffic. So that's what discovery mapping is. It was basically a way to create decentralized network planning to like figure out where people are and where people aren't, where cell service exists and where it doesn't. And that's what you got rewarded for, right, So the more you discovery map, the more you earned, the more you earn tokens. And I think that was okay,

it worked well. There's a group of people that's very upset that we went away from that model, But the bigger group of people, by many, many, many orders of magnitude, are still highly skeptical about crypto, and anytime you are associating crypto with your products, you run a little bit of that risk. Right. You are no longer just a phone service, You're like a crypto company, right, and that creates some level of skepticism. I think that's going to

improve over time, and certainly is improving over time. But we thought it would make more sense if we hid the crypto part away from the user, right, So we would still earn from discovery mapping, so that still happens, but we would use that to subsidize phone plans basically and effectively make them free. And that was our way of like still rewarding the user by doing it in

a completely different way. So rather than like directly giving users tokens, we now keep those tokens and the user gets a free phone plan or a discounted phone plan or whatever out of it. In the back end, you also points in the same way that you would with a credit card or an airline, and you can use those points to buy stuff, right, gift cards, like whatever it may be. And we think, you know, we think

that's better. We think that's a better model because it appeals to everyone, right, Like even if you're even if you're cryptocentric, you understand like what's going on in the background,

and that's interesting to you. If you're not cryptocentric, if you don't care about crypto, or you don't know about it, or you think it's a scam or whatever, you still don't care because you get a free cell phone plan out of it, right, And so I think that that is, at least to me, I'm obviously biased, but I think that is the sort of future of like how you should apply crypto to consumer businesses is that you you make them sort of crypto enabled rather than crypto facing

to some extent, and I think that's been wildly successful for us so far. Here Immobile is growing at an incredible rate. We're adding two or three thousand subscribers a day right now, which in some universe doesn't sound like a lot until you think about the fact that like AT and T loses fifty thousand prepaid subscribers every quarter

or whatever, right, and so we are. We are growing very very quickly relative to the rest of the market, certainly outpacing AT and T team over Izon on when it comes to prepaid and I'm excited to see how that how that goes, like whether that is whether this model of like sort of inverting crypto into something that's sort of under the hood is the right thing to do over time or not. Right now, it certainly feels like it is.

more than I want ethereum to succeed. And I think that part is, you know, when when Helium was proposing to migrate away from our l one, you can really got to see that tribal thing come out. It didn't matter whether or not it made any sense or not.

People just wanted you to migrate to like whatever l one blockchain, like they were a token holder that they were a token slash bag holder of and there was no logic applied to it whatsoeverage just like either than this, and therefore you should move to that or you're otherwise you're a scam. But basically was that was That was

where so Crypto still has a way to go. I think into what you said is true, but I think that's where it should go, right, Like Solana should just be like the better option that you use to deploy Web three apps, but not really the selling point, you know, like it and someone had this very good mock, you know, sort of troll image of like what Netflix would look like in Web three and it would be like streaming videos on Solana or something right that, and you know,

and no one really cares about that. No one's watching Netflix because it because they run their own data center or they have clever CDNs or whatever. It's just you want millions of titles like out of the press of a button, and that's what you're getting, right, And so there's a ways to go before that's true. I think the financial incentives make it more complicated to get to the place that you're describing and the thing that Helium

Mobile is doing. But the thing I love about it is that we are sort of very much outside of crypto. I mean, Helium Mobile might be a fifty hundred million dollar business this year and it is sort of separate in a way from crypto, but not you know, like it only exists because of the crypto power behind it, but the end user doesn't really see or feel that in any way, Oh for sure.

those guys. And the reason I think it's interesting is is it makes obvious sense, right, Like, of course this would be a better way of deploying a wireless network than spending you know, one hundred and fifty billion dollars, you know, building cell towers and going you know and installing in every single location with fiber backle and all

of this stuff. Like that's obviously not going to be the way forward, you know, And some of that is cost, and some of that is technology, right, like things like pass Point, which is the technology that we use that allows what I described where an AT and T subscriber will just jump on and off to the Healium network without having to like authenticate or go through a portal or do any of that stuff. You know. Pass Point is a pretty old technology. It's at least a decade old,

but it's only recently started to become widely adopted. And then Wi Fi has greatly improved, you know, especially with Wi Fi six, WiFi seven, you know, like that has allowed companies like ours and other deep end players to like very very cheaply deploy network coverage that's really really useful, you know, like a Wi Fi access point or a hot spot of hours can support hundreds or of thousands of simultaneous users, but the device itself might only cost

a couple hundred bucks, right, And so it's a completely different paradigm than what the teleco industry has been used to. And so I think they're curious about that, and it's interesting and I have to imagine this part of everyone who looks at this and says, what if this is? What if this is uber to taxi cabs? Right, Like, what if that's what's about to happen, and it's what

should happen. And I think those that are early on it and paying attention to it at least have that curiosity in their mind that like, Okay, this could be this could be how tel code networks get deployed in the future going forward, and the way we've been doing it in the past is all wrong, which is a bit which is a huge win for them, right because populations are still expanding, they're still moving. So it's not like you've built your wireless network and now you're done.

Like it's a constant job, right, Like you're constantly having to build more coverage and more capacity and that's expensive, you know, as is maintaining your existing network. And so I think everyone is interested in different models and different ways to build network coverage that their customers can use. And starlink is probably the best example of that, right where starlink should over time render outdoor cell towers like

completely obsolete over time? Why would you do that? And so I think there's a lot of interesting stuff happening and it's a super exciting time to be involved in that industry.

a challenge, you know. I think the best way I think I could answer that question is that one of the things I hope for crypto to do the best of all is change capital markets right so that you don't need to be acquired, you don't need to IPO, you don't you know, their liquidity exists in this public universe that is accessible to everyone. And it's been really really cool to see the SEC starting to focus and

talk about tokenizing equity for example. It's a thing I'm super interested in because we are we have a sort of unique business where there's a crypto part of it, but there's also a sort of off chain part of it which generates a lot of revenue, And is there a way to sort of merge those two things together so that token holders can participate in the equity side of the business somehow, which typically is impossible, but like you have to either IPO, you have to be an

a credited investor that gets into these deals somehow, and it's not a deal. So the thing that I hope most of all is that crypto like democratizes access to wealth basically, right, because it is wildly unfair that you know, me or vcs or whatever, you get really access to a lot of these companies. By the time they IPO, everyone's already rich, like you are way down, like you regular person are so far down the line now, and everyone else has already made ten thousand x learn investment, right,

And so I've never liked that. I've always thought that was elitist. I've always thought the accredited investor laws around, like you must make one hundred and fifty grand or two under and fifty grand or whatever it is a year, is just a dumb way of like deciding who should get to invest in what. Let me invest in whatever I feel like investing in, right, And so that's what I hope happens the long way of answering your question.

But I would hope ultimately that Helium never has to be acquired because that market infrastructure exists and we just use that rather than needing to be acquired or go public or whatever it may be.

have this deal that we do with Telefonica. Most Americans probably Telefonica, but they're an enormous global telecom based in Spain. They operate a subsidiary called movis Star in Mexico. And they think they were like today we have to pay AT and T and tell sell and others to access their towers and it's expensive and we don't want to build our own towers. So what can you do for us? And so we did this pilot with them for several months.

We sort of took over like a city Wahaka. And I think because there's always skepticism or like no one believes that what we're doing is real or not or that or that it works so that it works well. And so it took a few months of doing these trials and they I think, we're very excited about what they saw. And so now we're expanding sort of all over mex and I think we will start to see subscribers go live in Q three, I think, I think

is the intention. And when I say go to live, I mean the Movistar Telephonica subscribers in Mexico will automatically start to use the Helium network. They won't have to join anything, they won't have to opt in, they won't have to do anything. And so that's, you know, that's what's happening, and we hope to see that light up this year.

where we focused. We want to we want to go larger in terms of subscriber base, will the network to be larger. I want to work with more vendors in these ecosystems, whether that's Wi Fi, access point vendors or telecoms like AT and T. We're spending a lot of time on that sort of business development work, and we got a lot of stuff going on on the token side that we've been spending time thinking about, like the

tokenizing equity thing that we're describing. I really want to find a way to sort of blend those two ideas together where you don't have HNT and you don't have herely immobile equity is two separate things that they are sort of congruent and a singular thing is a thing that I really want to spend some time on that I don't think we could have done in the prior SEC administration that that we can do now. So that's kind of where we're going, is that we're just trying

to grow more and more and more. I don't have a crazy announcement for you about like launching satellites or anything like that. We're just getting bigger and bigger. You'll start to see on May nineteenth, we are sort of taking over in New York, so you'll see subway comers covered in Heliumobile and you'll see billboards and stuff everywhere. So really trying to push pretty hard on customer acquisition and sort of growing a Helium Mobile as one of the largest telcos in the country.

the regime, you know, with the government much more pro crypto, and I feel like entrepreneurs and innovators are breathing a sigh relief and they can focus on building and doing their thing. How are you feeling about this change and are you optimistic you know, Congress can get legislation through this year.

still seems to be very politically motivated. No one's making decisions because they're good decisions. They're just making decisions because they may make someone look good or bad. But I'm still optimistic there in general, Like I think, you know, I want to see like the stable coind of legislation get through, for example, and anything that makes it easier for crypto to be also more legitimized but also more accessible,

I think is very important. And I'm really hopeful that we move out of this sort of crime era a little bit. It's still it's still a very sort of pump and dump driven universe, and I think that's just tough for retail guys, right, Like, we live in this world and we sort of understand what to avoid and not avoid. But I think newcomers coming to the outside

everything looks like doge to them. Yeah, I might. I might make one hundred million dollars on this thing, right, and I think a lot of money gets lost that way, so I hope he steals. SEC still stays very focused on fraud on bad actors because they really genuinely like ruin it for everyone that's that's working hard to try and do real things. And there's a lot of us in the industry working hard to do real things. So I'm optimistic for that, looking forward to it.

if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be.