Amir Haleem: Helium – The People's Wireless Network #434

Transcript

hello and welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution my name is brian crane and i'm here today with amir helene and he's the founder and ceo of helium helium is using kind of like a crypto network to build out the wireless network uh like very cool and really excited to dive into that with him before we go into that just a brief for from our sponsors so first of all we have noises safe you can also save his smart wallet that allows you to control your digital asset in a much more granular way you can use multiple private keys a subset of which to use for particular transactions

store them on different types of wallets or and know this safe is also kind of their leading asset management platform for dolls with more than 100 billion that's kind of managed diagnosis safe so go check out gnosis safe and second one actually also a wallet different kind of wallet so tally which is a web 3 d5 wallet that's kind of like a community owned metamask alternative so it's fully open source and fully uh dao governed our controlled uh the community edition's out now and they're coming out with the full browser extension basically next week so go check it out at italia.cache and with that let's get to our episode uh about

helium so i've i've been like listening a little bit to like some podcasts with you and like learning a 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 didn't really like understand this and would love to like maybe dive in if you go like straight there it's like what's it like wireless network and like why is why are your wireless networks interesting yeah good question i mean helium definitely sort of an odd one in in the crypto space like compared to others because we're doing the sort of physical world thing um and that's we're not the

only one but but certainly one of only very few um you know that the mission for helium really started way before our crypto adventure like we we started the company to try and build uh basically a big sensor network right like we wanted uh people to be able to connect sensors to the internet and do it really cheaply and not have to pay for a cell phone plan and be able to run on batteries and you know the the kind of stuff that people describe as the internet of things um and that was sort of the mission objective of the company um and it took us you know a few years of 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 uh and this sort of like the traditional approach is spend many billions of dollars doing that right which is what you see from like a traditional telco whether it's att or vodafone or orange or whatever um and then the new approach which i think helium has 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 on the even the

prior question so you're saying like you know an iot network right the network for these uh sensors to connect with like why are there particular i don't know 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 i mean at the time that we started the company um you know 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 uh 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 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 it 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 where a package is not just what truck it's on uh you need kind of like a throwaway

type sensor 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 uh you know the department of forestry is is someone that we've talked to about building wildfire sensors for example right like they want to know when when fires start so they can put them out more quickly before they become like a blazing inferno and so you know the the use cases are like extremely wide and i expect to start to see like consumer applications like so far iot has really been focused on like 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 and because there's a sort of broad scale network that people can use really really cheaply we're starting to see other types of application like they're now pet trackers you know like dog and cat trackers on the network like bike trackers like portable gps trackers and i think we're early in figuring out what the consumer applications are but i think there's going to be plenty of them and there's going to be like even more on the industrial b2b side okay cool and are there particular use cases that you're especially excited about i mean though the wildfire one has always been super interesting to me just because it's it's frustrating

uh that we're in like 2022 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's homes get destroyed and people die um and it's you know just one of those things that if we had better like sensing of like you know generally things would be better and as a result of fires you get really 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 um and i still find that to be a really

interesting uh sort of universe of problems uh 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 an 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 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 but you were asked that question and then you were like basically talking about like ah that's

really hard and like i think you're asking about 5g so how can you talk a little bit about like you know how has the network evolved when you say it's going beyond it's starting to go beyond this iot sensors yeah i mean if you think about what helium really has 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 um 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 ant miner 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 and 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 right 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 what what about you know building a

cellular network this way right like could you could you have people deploy you know equip like our device is called a hotspot is like a box about that big and the question was like what if there was a cellular version of that right could 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 so spectrum access at least in the united states and most of the most of the world is is the the problem right like that the spectrum is owned by verizon and att and t-mobile and like these massive like corporations and the multiple billions of dollars spent on on buying 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 a huge deal is that a lot of cell phones already support this right so if you have an iphone 11 12 13 or if you have any like modern galaxy device or um any modern pixel like they already support cbrs 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 too because usually you know getting into 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 possible to have a 500 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 with cellular do you think in the future will it be

okay i can get a you know mobile phone number mobile sort of you know relationship with you know vodafone 18t uh you know rarity mobile or helium will it be like that kind of thing or or will it be more sort of like the backbone to other cellular networks i expect it to initially be uh more on the sort of backbone side like you know most it's kind of 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 sports arena or if you go into an airport or you go you know usually another company is actually operating the the cellular network inside those venues and then they're sharing the data back with att and it's all very seamless for the consumer right like for you you're just on a t and like nothing has really changed and 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

networks recently so dish is going to start roaming their customers onto the network and so that's a really big deal but i expect it to sort of spread to other carriers too 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's sort of the modern day version of a bank like there's lots of companies 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

um 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 gonna be super interesting it's a very different way to very different way to build a network uh and i think that's just gonna result in a network that's just very different right it's gonna be much cheaper and it's gonna be in the coverage is going to be in places that you wouldn't usually expect and it's going to be um i think fascinating to watch that evolve wow that's amazing and then it 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 because you depend on the cbrs 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 hopeful that other countries are going to start to do the same thing um but for now like we're sort of focused on the us just because we've you know that problem is already solved right or otherwise i guess the question could also be i don't know if there's like some sort of you know daw or treasury or something that could be then basically by uh spectrum in other countries i mean 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 dow's form to buy the constitution or like the wu-tang album

or whatever and and you'll be awesome to think of it 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 it's 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 helium 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 have an idea like that that if you look at something like tesla then i think you had this 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 it has like gigantic evaluation it gives basically this almost you know unlimited stream of capital right to and 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 you even see that right with something like constitution da which is kind of crazy right how people kind of

come together raise so much money for like this thing so i think with something like spectrum this would be like people would be like most people also i don't have a good experience i think with their cell phone providers right like i really dislike i think pretty much all of the ones i've had but like yeah i mean it's one of the most interesting things about the space actually is that like everyone hates like the incumbent play 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 like universally like every country just hates these people like there's something just sort of built even if the service is really good you just are sort of like you're supposed to hate them

um and that's sort of what's happened so 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 there was an alternative 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 it's something that i've sort of observed over the years of doing this and it doesn't matter what country you go to like everyone always has the same opinion so before you were you know you're talking about decentralizing this backbone and then you know you'd 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 is is the carrier itself something that you can also provide in a 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've got to interact with like tokens and stuff like that and and you know the the ui i think we did a pretty good job of like improving the ui for for doing that you know like our 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 a money exchanger is is really tricky and so there are there are things to like think about that i think make the experience difficult if like a fully decentralized way but i think you can get pretty close uh where where you don't really need like a specific entity to be your carrier and especially you know technologies like esim now also is a big deal right like where you don't need a physical like piece of plastic anymore that goes in your phone you just scan a qr code on like 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 to like try and tackle it even even just two or three years ago would have been a nightmare right but now it's it's feasible and doable uh 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 u.s and i think it's going to start accelerating for the remainder of the year amazing amazing and then while we're at it what about you know things like the broadband or you know can you do the physical wire networks also yeah my expectation is that like

technology is getting bit good enough that you can do away with the cable part completely right so like there there are now like enough interesting projects whether it's like facebook's terra graph or there's you know a company called tirana for example that you know are sort of working on this part religiously right like how how do i deliver like gigabit broadband to the home wirelessly in like some cost-effective way right where where i don't need you know a million transmitters in a city i need like 50. and you know so i i think that's going to change that kind of technology is going to change the way we think about delivering internet to that it 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 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 and a normal isp a wisp delivers the internet connection completely wirelessly right so there's no there's no cable involved similar to like similar to like starlink right like starlink you're getting it from a satellite but from a wisp you're

getting it from like a transmitter that's in the same city right like it's 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 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 with 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 gigabit 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 right like is that you you can decentralize all you want at the app layer like at the web 3 sort of 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 the old business model of like metadata 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 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 it's just the internet

is like not designed for like vpns and like privacy and so uh i'm optimistic that that's going to change over time and i think decentralizing like access to the internet itself is is a very big an important part of that equation yeah that was exactly what came up in my mind when you were speaking before right because you yeah there is always one thing right that bothers you sort of as a crypto user is like okay you can use all those things but in some in some way it still feels you're going through this kind of pipe right which is connected which is controlled by this isp 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 i guess a bunch of projects that

you know i mean things like tor or then you have things like maybe some people working on like decentralized tour versions right there's this name thing and uh 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 that you know the name thing kind of makes sense to me for like sending crypto transactions but really you want to have the you know more fundamental decentralization i think so that sounds really amazing how yeah it's i mean it's one of these things where like you know as i was saying like there's a bunch of like dvpn projects i think orcid 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 google's 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 and so it's it's just the user experience of using vpns is bad because the internet is bad right like it depends so much on knowing where you where you are and who you are that ever like everything is designed around that those two those two things and so even when you've got stuff like the vpns and the dvpns it's still not great for consumers which is why it's not like a huge it's not a huge business to be a 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 i 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 you know firewall or they they shut down certain you know like sometimes you had countries shut down facebook or social media right governments if they were like oh 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 you easily i think it makes it harder it it sort of depends on the like level of like censorship right i mean if 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 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 like 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 to like get back to the internet yet that's like truly censorship resistant so yeah i mean i think it it improves the situation but i don't think 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 um but there's 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 those become much much harder to like censor right like i don't like how are

you going to like stop access to a satellite right you'd 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 where there are more and more options and like helium is is one of those tools i think that will help in that in that fight pretty excited about this that is something that's very needed yeah i mean helium has grown has 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 hot spots to like 600 000 hot spots with another like three million on back order you know something like 75 of the us zip codes has access to helium now and like

you know it's 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 i think has traditionally been not very good outside of like centralized services like coinbase and stuff that's also improving you know like the wallets are getting better like the apps are getting better you know like everything is sort

of improving um but yeah i 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 hotspots on the network over the next uh 24 months one another way that i was sort of like thinking about helium a little bit that seemed interesting to me if you know bitcoin you can also think of as it's this sort of economic it's this incentive system that has bootstrap also you know kind of the deployment of this you know physical network where you have all these miners running the specialized machines

uh you know that tend to be maybe more uh larger facilities right because they need to get cheap electricity and these economies have scaled there but you know you still have this 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 that 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 miners 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 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

um so there's some economies of scale that are occurring there because you know vendors are all buying 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 has not been great you know because because of covert and chip shortages and like every everything which is affecting like multiple different industries um 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 you know you get the same sort of economies of scaled as you would in a more centralized approach because everyone is using like approximately the same kind of hardware and i mean all of these hotspots right

they also have a private key and and you know so implicitly a wallet do you think that wallet you know these how do you think that will have like usage beyond the kind of narrow function it has any helium network and 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 hotspots are kind of like nfts really right like they are they have a private key and they are they are non-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 nfts right and and that's kind of an interesting idea um 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 we're starting to have the conversation with lots of different projects uh similar to what you're describing where there's a bunch of like dvpn projects for example who are like okay would be perfect if we could run our vpn

software on your like 600 000 hotspots uh because that's you know a pretty massive like vpn network all of a sudden right so i 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 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 i'm always so interested in privacy and anonymity uh and 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 i would love it if he could maybe dive a little bit more deeply into you know kind of like the helium network and like how does the network look like so you know you've talked about um the wireless network right and then you have to um you know the cellular network right which is you know different devices so can you talk a bit about you know what is the the the architecture of the helium network you know what are the different the main um kind of participants in the system and what are their roles yeah so there's i mean i i think a few different ways to think about it so at

its core you know helium is a layer one blockchain so it's it's a completely sort of from scratch written uh blockchain network that doesn't build on top of anything else and most of that is because we started this in in 2016 or 2017 and there really wasn't a lot to use back then like you either were building on top of ethereum which was which we thought was going to be too expensive even back then um or you were forking bitcoin or or you know doing something like that and so we built something from scratch so at its core it's sort of a layer one like proof-of-stake blockchain you know there's 3 500 validators who are responsible for like block production transaction verification validation

um they stake 10 000 hnt which is the hnt is the sort of native token on on helium so something like 35-40 percent of the supply of hnt is staked in validators who who run the network and then you've got the hotspot hosts themselves and i think the best way of thinking about spots is 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 start right because there aren't a lot of devices to use the

network yet when you're when you're building it 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 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 right it's on the order of on the worst case it's about a mile and in the best case it's like 100 miles you know these hot spots transmit this sort of encrypted data back and forth with each other like this sort of challenge protocol

um 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 hotspots 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 at home um 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 they're 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 hnt in order to actually use the network right and that that money goes to that agency goes to the to the hotspot hosts so 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 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 people mobile phone networks you know things like that so every type of wireless

network will have it the same sort of characteristics where there's sort of someone on the supply side like the host and then there's someone on the demand side which will be the users and it sort of will depend on the type of network as to like who those people are with proof of coverage are there you know how secure is this are there like attack scenarios that somebody can you know spoof things and um trick hot spots yeah i mean it's an ongoing amount of work right i mean as hnt has become valuable and 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 um 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 um so like one example 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 hotspots they can put their hotspot 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 uh all of them are built from scratch

for for better or for worse and so you know it's a constantly sort of evolving process to sort of find these problems and and improve them and fix them and sort of think about the 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 now comes from the community itself rather than from the core development team and i think it's 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 it's certainly not perfect by by any means but it's heading in the right direction and then do you see this as kind of like one sys so for example hnt

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 right now there's sort of two tokens really in the system right there's there's hnt which is the 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 actually a second token called a data credit uh 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 it's always point zero zero zero zero one dollars um and the nice thing about that system

is that it's very predictable in cost in terms of how you use the network like it's always going to cost you the same amount of like us dollars um and the way that you acquire data credits is by destroying hnt right so if you want h if you want data credits you have to take h t and like burn it and the ratio of that changes right because hnt's value is fluctuating and so you know depending on how much att is worth when you burn one hnt you end up with a different amount of data credits depending on what the value of hnt is at that 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 like one day it might cost you like a dollar to use the network and the next day it might cost you like 100 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 uh was the way to do that so it's a really neat system and it's it's worked well because it 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 i think with this system and in the end the interesting amazing thing is also that you have this you know decentrally owned network so of course at that point you know governance also becomes

interesting so how do you how does hnt or how does the network governance work today and how do you see that evolving in the future so there's a a sort of improvement proposal process that we you know 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 uh weighted using hnt so people vote on whether they like these proposals or not um there's a lot there's there's many proposals for like how to improve the proposal process right like the proposal process should be different 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 um blockchain networks and so that that poses like a different kind of challenge uh but yeah i mean again i i don't i'm not i don't think any blockchain network has figured out governance at all like in 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 main contributors are in github and the ethereum foundation kind of decides what to do with ethereum and you know the 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 um but there's again a lot of like really good suggestions and a lot of good proposals on like how to improve the governance but but today it's it's sort of the stake weighted process and 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 get 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 um and so the sort of engineering group or the engineering side of the community needs to grow as well otherwise you're just sort of preparing proposals that can't be 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 to do in this kind of decentralized rate right where even today in most blockchains you you tend to have you know a main development team that kind of does 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 the stuff yeah and i i think it's you know it's an interesting problem right because you you the team can only do so much right and

so we we have like the 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 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 can 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 um but yeah i mean engineers are always hard to come by and you know the best ones are usually busy doing something so 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 uh blockchain that has sort of figured that out right because in the end you have like bitcoin and ethereum where there's actually isn't that kind of proposal process and then uh so i don't think there's any blockchain where you're at the stage i mean it's it's also a coordination problem of like you know how can you get potentially

a decentralized governance to like you know manage software development yeah and it's hard i mean i i think bitcoin has this problem like in a severe way right like there's not there's no like if you're a distributed system blockchain engineer you're highly incentivized to go work on like solano or avalanche or polkadot or you know because those guys have like massive treasuries are going to pay you 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 that makes it hard people have bills to pay and like lives to live and you you know you you can't just work on on on good vibes you know so like so people

have to like make money and that that's that's a challenge i think in all of these systems and and mostly i've seen it solved through like grants you know so like there will be specific problems that a project is looking to solve and like will offer sort of a grant in order to solve that problem and that hopefully that sort of spurs the the ecosystem but yeah i i agree with you i think it's generally like an unsolved problem and like the core engineering team is sort of always the core engineering team um but yeah i 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 on a single team it's just it's too much work and too fragmented and is there also a kind of community fool or you know a mechanism where the

community uses governance to directly fund work we don't really have that today um but it's something that i i would definitely like to see um and i think there are some good examples of other uh other projects that have done a good job of that and 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 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 other blockchains other smart contract ecosystems yeah it's a thing that i i wish was

it's one of the downsides of building your own own thing you know like and at the time i i don't think there was a lot of alternative like we sort of had to do it that way um but i would love for a 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 to other chains so there's there's a group working in an algorand one there's a group working in a solano one you know i'd love to see something um on ethereum so i i like the bridging approach i mean there's obviously been a few hacks and and attacks on the bridges over 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 ledger part of helium moves to some existing layer one and you know let the layer two sort of remain on helium as their own sort of miniature block chains like there's a proposal like that in the community right now so we'll see but i i think it's highly valuable for h d to be to be part of that greater ecosystem and part of that broader ecosystem for sure yeah i mean i think that well for example if 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 if 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 blockchains are really capable of doing something quite as complicated as helium as a layer two or sort of on top of the of those networks like it's just too much state and like too much too much stuff to try and manage so i think that's part of what makes it difficult is 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 a different chain or something like that and 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 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 that would be the best way to like make it happen quickly yeah yeah i mean i think that would be a fine solution oh yeah you have things like axle and wormhole and i think they'll they'll easily connect helium to you know all the all the blockchains and i think it will be the best solution probably or you have things like ivc but that's

more work to implement i think yeah for sure um and then do you also see like enabling the deployment of smart contracts directly on 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 at sort of the second layer um 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 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

in helium trying to be like another smart contract blockchain there's already like so many of them that that are focused just on doing that and we'll certainly do it better than we could um so i think if there were smart contracts they would have to be like specific to a purpose like deploying wireless networks or deploying networks or deploying like distributed applications like that um that are networking related or something very specific to like the sort of purpose of what helium is otherwise i think you're in danger of just being another like i don't know just like like i iota kind of reminds me of that right like now it's sort of like another it's like an avalanche clone now and i don't really know what distinguishes something like iota from 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 and they could do a better job than we could yeah that's that's a tricky i think that's the sort of tricky balance i mean i i i can have worked a lot in the cosmos ecosystem and there i think there's also a lot of this that kind of balance right where you have like you launch a chain and then it has certain functionality and then you know maybe some people want to add things to the chain and then there's a question okay 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 uh 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 a decentralized way and not for like minting nfts 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 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 that the the thing that i probably worry about the most in the short term is is you know as we add more wireless

networks so things like cellular and wi-fi and stuff like making sure that the incentive model is like good enough you know for 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 all 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

um you know there's a lot of technical challenges that that we'll 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 of this size not that many have actually done it and so there's that kind of stuff i think we we have the right road map already to sort of mitigate a lot of that um but you know just dealing with something at this scale is is is a huge undertaking i think we've served something like 5 billion requests to the

to the api server over the last month or something like that and so you know it's at a large scale where like scaling problems become real um especially in especially scaling problems that don't have like well-known solutions like i think scaling web applications is quite well understood scaling like peer-to-peer networks is is not really well understood and so there are you know there are just our challenges there that that we're facing and working through but overall i think i worry about them less than the economic challenges yeah i i think i can see that as being a heart problem right because in the end you're sort of um 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 uh sort of car or you know how much business does the network do in terms of you know packages it's selling to sensors or other users yeah i mean i i think um you know on the sensor side one of the challenges i think with iot in general is that like the market for it 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 confine of like their building or in the warehouse or like you know what i mean and so that there haven't really been many applications where you assume that there was a network that was kind of like a cell network or a mobile network and so you're 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 or have like applications to start building them and everything when when hardware is involved is slow right like for someone to build a sensor application to build a hundred thousand sensors for example it's 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 so many steps required to like actually make something work and then manufacture it so that part is is tricky and so with a cellular network you don't have the same problem or you 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 you don't have the same problem you have a customer acquisition problem but it's a different you know a different type of problem than than you have in the iot universe and so yeah so so it's you know it it's

definitely uh it's definitely a challenge that requires a lot of patience because you you've got to sort of everyone involved in helium has to sort of understand that the iot side of the network is just going to take years in order for real usage to come because real usage is going to require manufacturing like lots and lots of sensors and just that process alone is 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 go faster but i'm not convinced that there is um not convinced that there is actually a way so we talked a little bit about privacy

but i would be curious about privacy specifically with regards to like iot i mean on some level that you know seems a little bit scary too right because if privacy are already not so good and then you also have like you know lots 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 that's a good question i mean i think the the privacy concern is different than sort of the big internet privacy concern like to me the

big internet privacy concern is more like you know an isp knows my browsing history and you know no know sort of everything that i do on the on the internet at least to some level um there's definitely potential for a concern in the iot space or like if you have a lot of sensors all over the place um they could for sure could be used maliciously but 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 um 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 and i think people have already started to do that with like air tags for example right like 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 so much amir it's been really really great to hear about helium i think it is like just an amazing accomplishment i think to build this like you know physical controlled network out and and i'm i'm really excited about like all the things that will become possible with it i think also that the intersection between crypto applications and you know having this physical network i think will be very powerful so yeah thanks so much for coming on amir yeah thank you thanks for having me um

i'm glad you're uh interested and excited about what helium is doing and super excited to see uh to see what comes next cool then thanks so much