Inside Helium’s vision for the future

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Fun fact: Helium was one of the first projects I was assigned to write about while still a lowly intern at Blockworks, and one of my articles from that summer earned me a couple angry DMs from Helium fans.

I’m tough but fair however — I also have become a Helium Mobile customer, and quite enjoy my $0 phone bill. Anyways, I’d never spoken to the CEO of the Helium Foundation until last week:

Q&A: Helium Foundation CEO on what’s next for the network

In early July, the Helium Foundation revealed in a blog post that Helium would expand “the mission of its scope” beyond wireless to include decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN).

Soon after, a Helium Improvement Proposal (HIP) went live to add the energy-focused startup Srcful to the Helium fold. The foundation has hinted that Helium will be adding more DePINs to the mix in the future.

To hear more about this vision, and the proposed onboarding of Srcful, we called up Helium Foundation CEO Abhay Kumar.

Keep reading for excerpts from Blockworks’ interview with Kumar, edited for clarity and brevity.

Jack: What was it that led the Helium Foundation to want to expand Helium beyond wireless?

Abhay: We’re a US-based 501(c)(6)…One of the things that we have to do as a 501(c)(6), which is a specific kind of tax-exempt organization in the US, is we have to sort of define what our mandate is on an annual basis.

And so one of the things that we wanted to do is expand that mandate. We did that internally. We wanted to formally talk about that externally, and this is because we’ve been spending time with other physical infrastructure network teams and trying to understand if the things that we’re building can be useful for them as well, right?

We write some open-source code. Can they use it too, right? Like very simple. Otherwise, what’s the point of writing open-source code? It should be used by others. It should be formed by others. That’s a good thing.

That’s kind of how we were meandering around this idea, but within the Helium ecosystem itself, we needed to know that there was a credible team that was willing to build something inside of the ecosystem. And so as we’re kind of waiting for the right team and the right time to talk about our expansion of scope, and at around the same time as this, [Srcful] is proposing something.

Jack: Say you onboard Srcful, and you onboard other DePINs. In ten years, how does Helium look differently than it looks today?

Abhay: It’s the end state that we kind of envisioned with this idea of having multiple networks.

It completes the vision where you have all of these networks, some of which may even compete with each other, building towards this singular ecosystem, maybe using the same social coordination layer or economic coordination layer. Maybe it’s a technical coordination layer.

[But] 10 years is a long time in crypto, right? I don’t like talking about stuff before I ship [it] in general. It’s just my style. Like 10 years seems…forever. [Chuckles]

Jack: So, maybe to go more granular to today: What is the benefit of building subnetworks versus like perfecting the IoT thing Helium already has going on?

Abhay: I think we can do both!

I think on the IoT side, it’s really about specific modifications to the way that IoT devices are deployed and the way that they’re incentivized to continue to provide coverage. Making it easier to actually onboard sensors and all of that work still happens.

To be clear, it’s not a distraction for us. You know, it might be on a one-day, two-day kind of basis, but overall it’s not just like, “Hey, we’re going to work on two more things.”

We’re also going to staff up to be able to serve those two things, or we find an efficiency in technology to be able to work on two different things.

Jack: What sorts of subnetwork projects would you look for or are you interested in?

Abhay: We’re not the largest HNT holder by far, so we could not vote to block something even if that was a goal, so I like that position that we’re in where I think people trust our voice, but we’re pretty careful about throwing our voice against certain HIPs or for certain HIPs.

What do we look for? Actually the bigger thing is like, what’s successful, right?

I think the biggest thing for me is that there has to be some obvious overlap or advantage of telling this community that this is a new network that they should care about.

There’s three places where I think there can be overlap for any new network: one is technical, like using the same smart contract, using the same programs, maybe the same economics. Two is very directly economic, using HNT, tying into the HNT data credit system, being able to earn HNT from ongoing emissions of HNT because of usage on the subnetwork, and the third is social, and social is not just like ‘hey, it’s the same people.’ It’s also the same locations, right? Maybe there’s an advantage of running on the same hardware or running in the same physical location.

I think it’s already good if two of those three overlap. If three of those three overlap, I think it’s actually really worthwhile.

So in the case of [Srcful’s] proposal, there’s an economic overlap, there’s a technical overlap and a social overlap. It actually, in my mind, hits all three.

Jack: Is there anything that would prevent helium from doing non-wireless networks?

Abhay: I mean, should we be a meme launchpad? Probably not. I don’t think there’s any overlap.

Maybe there’s some social, I don’t know, but I think most people would agree that that’s a stretch.

Jack: As far as hotspot onboarding numbers, in recent days, it’s maybe a dozen or so per day. Do you think this subnetwork system would help along that process of bringing more hotspots online?

Abhay: I dropped a link for a live view of online hotspots. Over 300k live hotspots today, and that fluctuates based on a variety of things, but I don’t know if it will necessarily onboard more IoT hotspots.

It might onboard them in places where there isn’t IoT coverage because, ‘hey, I can buy a single piece of hardware and it can cover both IoT and energy,’ so it might do that.

There’s actually been some interesting questions around, would there be too much density? Like, should the Srcful team have an energy-only hotspot rather than a both IoT and energy hotspot?

If you look at a map of San Francisco or New York, you could argue there’s still too much density of IoT, and so these are questions that are being brought up in our community recently.

But would it drive a lot of IoT deployment? Probably only in the places where there isn’t any right now, and there are plenty of parts of the world that don’t have active IoT hotspots.

— Jack Kubinec

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