Raised $365 million, node monthly revenue $20, Helium failed?

Source: Liron Shapira, Amir, Kyle Samani on Twitter

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Crypto investor Liron Shapira recently posted on social media that Helium, a decentralized wireless communications network, has raised a whopping $365 million in funding. And the results are not so good. According to his statistics,The Helium network earns just $6,500 a month, while a single miner earns $20 a month.

The tweet sparked a lot of discussion in the community and drew comments from Helium founder Amir and Multicoin Capital Managing Partner Kyle Samani. The two sides had a heated debate about the future of the Internet of Things and Helium, as BlockBeats summarizes below.

Liron Shapira question

Lately I've seen more and more comments on the Helium Reddit community about Helium's dismal rate of return. They spend an average of $400- $800 on a hot spot. Total mining sales exceed $250 million, and the nodes expect a return of $100 per month.However, the fact is that a single node single miner currently earns only $20 a month.

Meanwhile, Nova Labs, the company behind Helium, is able to pull 30 million HNTS a year from the network.

A16z partner Chris Dixon tweeted in his "mental model" post that Helium can't be built in Web2 because it requires Token incentives. But it turns out that Web2 won't motivate Helium due to low demand.

It's no surprise that end-user demand for Helium is scarce. The basic LoRaWAN market analysis shows thatThis is a speculative bubble around false, exaggerated use cases.

While the income of miners in any network is significantly reduced in a bear market, the $20 figure is an exaggeration, and the community response has Helium's founders and investors responding.

Helium founder and CEO Amir responds

First, some stats from Liron Shapira:

1.Nova Labs has raised approximately $250 million in funding since inception. But financing is all about buying equity in the company, not tokens in the network;

2. The company earns approximately 1.5 million HNTS per year, not the reported 30 million.

On Income:

1. The Helium network generates about $2 million in monthly fees. Most of these are in the form of Hotspot Onboarding fees, which shrink as the network saturates.

2. The network transmits about 650 million data packets per month, generating $6,500.

Using a company's equity investment to look at online revenue is like comparing apples to oranges. But Nova Labs does have a lot of funding, and we have a lot of great things to do with it, and we're going to use it to do our first wireless protocol, LoRaWAN, which is also a very low power low data rate protocol that Helium is working on right now specifically for sensor and telemetry applications. This is often referred to in the telecommunications world as a low-power wide area network, or LPWAN. These types of devices do not rely on cellular networks because of their short battery life and often high hardware costs. LoRaWAN should not compete in any way with LTE or 5G.

Although it has been around for the last decade or so, LPWAN is very nascent in a way. I believe the LPWAN field is already facing an extreme chicken-and-egg problem. A good application cannot be built because there is no network to use, and vice versa there is no network because there is no application.

Helium's LoRaWAN aims to solve this paradox by creating personal economic systems to build networks. With close to a million nodes and 10% of the world's population covered, this seems to be working well.

So why is Helium only making $6,500 a month? Unlike traditional cellular networks, there are currently no millions of devices that can connect to Helium. The top-level applications have yet to be built, and building them will take months or years.

But apps are out there now, and they're great. How about a tracking device in the form of a sticker that can be attached to anything? Such devices are being deployed as we talk about this.

Getting the infrastructure right is the first step. In fact, Helium has only been "available" in its coverage area for the past 6-9 months. Persuading users to rely on distributed networks built by individuals is not easy, and coverage is uneven. There are still a lot of areas that are not covered.

So again, is Helium a failure that proves that Web3 sucks? I would say this is just the beginning.My expectation for LoRaWAN has always been 5 to 10 years from the beginning of available network existence, which means coverage and cost.

I hope we see more and more applications built on the LoRaWAN side. The technology allows the use of unprecedentedcheap battery-powered devices. I'm happy to see what people have built.hereYou can see a partial demonstration of these builds.

At the same time, new 5G networks using unlicensed CBRS spectrum are being built. Most modern mobile phones support these bands, and the new open source protocol stack makes it possible to build public cellular networks for the first time.

And, thanks to the passage of proposal HIP51, other new networks will be built on top of Helium, including VPNS, CDNS, WiFi networks, and almost anything that involves a network of distributed nodes.

Critical voices are good for encryption and the Web3 world. There are a lot of crap projects out there, but the global iot network is not one of them, and I'm proud of what the Nova Labs team has built. We are witnessing great strides in this area from teams such as Pollen Mobile and Althea Network.

Expand your timeline, focus on the projects that are really making a difference, and keep your head down during the hard times. Everything else is just noise.

Kyle response

I have no problem with that number, iot customers have long lead times,Customers didn't get serious about the Helium iot until about 6 months ago, when it took 6-12 months to test the network, upgrade the hardware, update the service portal, and ship.

Liron 回复

According to theReports of Crunchbase ranges, in addition to a total of $250 million in venture funding, A16Z led the company's $111 million IC0 in 2021.

In addition, according to its white paper, the Helium network mints 30 million new HNTS every year, of which 33%, or 10 million HNTS, are paid to Helium Inc. as security tokens. And other investors holding security tokens.

Amir thinks the LoRaWAN Network will find adoption through apps like NanoThings. But where is the traction?

The numbers don't lie. Retail investors paid more than $250 million to buy more than 500,000 hotspots to build a distributed network that currently earns just $6,500 a month from data usage.

Here's a discussion I had with Helium venture capitalist KyleSamani in December 2021, and I askedWhat are the specific use cases for Helium. Think about it... When you reason through concrete examples, how big is the pay-per-use LoRaWAN market?

Now Helium is turning to building 5G networks. They are competing with existing 5G networks with perfect cellular architecture. Just give it time, they say. In our debate eight months ago, Kyl said give it a year. Based on their LoRaWAN data, I'm skeptical about their 5G competition.

Paying attention to project details can help more members of the technical community separate Web3 hype from reality. When opinion leaders share empty and abstract content, please ask for details. I'm using this technique here topost.

Web3 opinion leaders often deflect, shame, or block real surveys, and that's bad. With enough pressure (14,000 likes, apparently), we can answer basic questions about use cases and where the money is going. I applaud Amir Haleem for his response and expect to see the same from Web3 ventures like A16Z.

我知道大多技术平台都有其生命周期，就像现在还有人使用光盘吗？ 但 Helium 以 2.5 亿美元以上融资价格吸引了超 20 万名普通民众投资超 50 万台设备。何况还有正在流通着的总价值超 10 亿美元的 HNT Token。 有些时刻我们不得不给出结论，Helium 已在 Web3 世界中走入绝路。

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