Has Helium Completely Failed?

Key Points:

• Helium from a growing network has a lot of potential, but as it moves through the crypto industry, it has run out of steam.
• The challenges the network is facing are still a problem that needs to be solved.
• Since switching to Solana, the network seems to have improved.

Helium’s popularity may be attributed to its outstanding idea and growing narrative-decentralized Internet and geographic location oracles: a decentralized wireless network for “Internet of Things” devices.

The Internet of Things is not the same as the regular Internet or the mobile Internet. The Internet of Things focuses on item connectivity and solves the challenge of connecting devices to the Internet. As a result, the quantity of connectable terminals has emerged as a significant competitive advantage for the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things includes shared bicycles, smart cities, smart agriculture, autonomous smart autos, and smart homes.

Helium is powered by cryptography, and the wireless network is comprised of Helium hotspots, which have antennas capable of sending small quantities of data over large distances via radio frequencies. Of all of the initiatives, its story shines the brightest.

Nevertheless, as time passed, the difficulties that were first masked behind the new chain’s high-yield bubble began to appear. How did the network blow a good hand, and what went wrong for the team? Why did the team reject Helium in favor of the Solana chain?

Helium’s development

Helium’s history may be dated back to 2013, only a few years after the inception of Bitcoin. Helium may be described as an Internet of Things initiative that has nothing to do with blockchain in its early years of existence. Before 2017, the network recognized the significance of the blockchain and then relied on the blockchain’s incentive mechanism to capitalize on the trend; today, it seems that Helium’s choice was sound.

Helium reached its high in 2021 after a steady rise from 2019 to 2021. With token sales, $111 million in funding will be finished in 2021. Its funding quantity is greatly overstated in many public chains, and it is not far behind Aptos. Its potential and prospects as a developing public chain are quite promising. This is also the first stage in which the network began to rise.

Why is Helium not as successful as expected?

Skilled miners have little advantage

Helium hotspots offer wireless network coverage for millions of LongFi-enabled devices, and miners get Token payouts HNT for this.

The LoRaWAN communication network is at the heart of the network, for which a blockchain-based incentive layer is being constructed. Moreover, it uses its unique Poc (Proof of Coverage) consensus to demonstrate that HotSpot delivers network coverage.

Since its hotspot mechanism is so tightly linked to the mining process, it was quite popular in the early days.

HNT mining equipment is also very light and small, comparable to a home router, with minimal environmental requirements, the creation of a network is not influenced by the surrounding environment, and mining may begin at home or in the office, resulting in exceptionally low energy usage.

The Bobcat mining machine’s deployment procedures are very straightforward. You simply need to connect the mining machine’s antenna and network cord.

Nevertheless, after being voted the community’s most popular hotspot of the year, the “Lynx” mining machine has become more scarce, and the domestic price has typically been fired to 2000-2500U per unit, and the cost of mining for miners has rapidly grown.

At the same time, its unique mining process causes complications at the mining level, making it hard for professional miners to enter.

In contrast to typical mining machinery, Helium does not imply that the dense the deployment, the greater the revenue. To provide more consistent revenue and better output, the distance between hotspots must exceed 300 meters to get rewards, which makes it simple for hotspots to engage in PoC to earn more money, so hotspots do not need to be placed too thickly.

Given the city’s building density, the recommended spacing between hotspots is between 500 and 1000 meters. Several complicated constraints limit the deployment distance of miners, therefore, many particular coverage effects have been debugged and improved many times.

This complicates the mining procedure significantly. A professional miner team has no benefit in purchasing a big number of mining devices.

Helium is accused of misrepresenting partners

The collaboration is often mentioned on its website, and the Lime firm logo appears in the press with numerous news publications. Salesforce, in particular, was highlighted as one of the largest firms to collaborate with Helium.

Lime and Helium are both Internet of Things elements with clear strong combo qualities. Based on their Helium connection, users may view Lime scooters accessible near them.

The elements Lime and Helium work well together. It will be a powerful partnership if they can establish a constructive connection.

Helium, on the other hand, does not seem to be striving hard to extend its cooperation region and win the Lime market. Instead, before acknowledging the collaboration, it prominently displayed the emblem on its website, raising concerns about deceptive promotion.

It again emphasizes how trustworthy the platform is by users in May 2021 and added Lime and Salesforce to its client list but left out the tagging. Lime’s Twitter account directly, but exclusively for Salesforce.

A Lime spokesman indicated in August 2022 that the firm has not had any interaction with Helium since a short first test in summer 2019, and that at the time of the test, a request was made not to use the Lime company’s name in promotional materials.

Helium has purportedly claimed for years that Lime is utilizing its geolocation technology, and a Salesforce spokesperson verified that the business is not collaborating with Helium. Instead of partnering with Lime or the US software giant Salesforce, Helium clearly displays both firms’ logos on its website, causing uproar in the community. After intense criticism from the community and “partners,” Helium’s official website page deleted the two firms’ logos from the list of collaborations.

Yet the upheaval caused by this occurrence seems to have shattered Helium and Lime’s possible future collaboration.

Significant revenue decline

Notwithstanding the fact that the increased number of hotspots has enabled Helium to make more than $1 million in monthly income. Nevertheless, sales began to fall in 2022.

In July 2022, cryptography investor Liron Shapira announced on social media that the decentralized wireless communication network Helium had secured massive funding of $365 million but that the monthly revenue of the Helium network and a single mining machine were insufficient. According to his figures, the Helium network’s monthly revenue is just $6,500, while a single mining machine’s monthly income is only $20.

Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, did not dispute the amount. Nevertheless, he believes that IoT clients have significant lead times and that customers did not take Helium IoT seriously until 6 months ago, 6-12, when network testing, hardware upgrades, service portal updates, and delivery were all taken into account.

Helium said two months later that it would forsake its own blockchain in favor of Solana. Helium’s monthly revenue has steadily declined since then. Monthly revenue started to slip below a million dollars in October, and the income of Lynx mining machines became exceedingly low. At this point, several individuals left the circle. The once-hot Lynx mining equipment seems to be extinct now.

Compatibility issues with EVM

Helium L1 was created and constructed with the Erlang programming language, which is uncommon in the crypto world. Although this has drawn the attention of important developers and contributors in the blockchain world, the Helium development community is limited in comparison to the Rust language used by Ethereum, Solidity, and Solana.

Erlang is a virtual machine-based interpreted language that currently includes a native code compiler. Erlang has also supported script execution from the R11B-4 version. Erlang is a multi-paradigm programming language that supports functional, parallel, and distributed programming paradigms. Sequential Erlang is a functional programming language with eager evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing.

In contrast to Helium’s unpopular programming language and development environment, the Ethereum EVM ecosystem has attained unparalleled prosperity after the 2020 DeFi summer.

As a result, BSC has supported EVM since the beginning of the ecosystem, allowing developers to simply convert and deploy Ethereum dApps.

Helium plainly suffers more from the drawbacks than non-EVM-compliant chains benefit from. According to the most recent statistics given by @ProofofGitHub, the number of developers of certain well-known non-EVM-compatible public chains on GitHub greatly outnumbers that of the network in GitHub’s daily development activity.

Conclusion

Helium was not initially an encryption company; instead, it was attempting to establish typical long-range, peer-to-peer wireless networks. Due to financial constraints, encryption was later used as an incentive technique. To create a decentralized network, it used encryption technologies. It got positive feedback and a large number of committed users early on, which is why Helium triumphed in the start.

Unfortunately, the company’s decision to turn to crypto caused it to lose several chances to disrupt the status quo since it did not properly comprehend the encryption area.

Yet, happily, the new IOT Token surged dramatically in the week after its migration to the Solana network. IOT, like HNT, is mined using Helium hotspot equipment. These Tokens are supported by the original HNT and may ultimately be converted to HNT.

DISCLAIMER: The information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

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Harold

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