Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Amir Haleem: Helium – The People's Wireless Network

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Helium is a global, distributed network of long-range wireless coverage hotspots for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, powered by the Helium blockchain. Community run hotspots create 'The People’s Network' and they are rewarded with $HNT, the native cryptocurrency of the network, through the Proof-of-Coverage mechanism. Helium has managed to build the largest P2P network with over 600,000 hotspots and is now starting to deploy other networks like a 5g cellular network.We were joined by Founder and CEO of Helium, Amir Haleem, to chat about how Helium works and the most interesting use cases, how the Proof-of-Coverage mechanism allows the community to participate, and the road ahead for the network.Topics covered in this episode:What is a wireless network and what makes them so interestingThe objective of HeliumThe use cases Amir is most interested inHow cellular networks are utilizedHelium and censorship resistanceThe architecture of the Helium NetworkProof-of-coverageThe HNT and Data Credit tokensThe possibility of Helium becoming interoperable and hosting smart contractsThe biggest challenges in Helium's futureEpisode links: HeliumHelium on TwitterAmir on TwitterSponsors: Gnosis Safe: Gnosis Safe is a smart wallet for securely managing digital assets and allows you to define customized access permissions. - https://epicenter.rocks/gnosissafeTally: Tally is a new wallet for Web3 and DeFi that sees the wallet as a public good. Think of it like a community-owned alternative to MetaMask. - https://epicenter.rocks/tallycashThis episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/434

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 and I'm here today with Amir Halim, and he's the founder and CEO of Helium. Helium is using kind of like a crypto network to build out a wireless network. Like very cool and really excited to dive into that with him. Before we go into that, just a briefer from our sponsors. So first of all, we have Canosis Safe. Gnosis Safe is a smart wallet that allows you to control your digital asset in a much more granular way. You can use multiple prior keys, a subset of which to use for particular transactions.

You can store them on different types of wallets. And Canosis Safe is also kind of their leading asset management platform for dollars with more than $100 billion. That's kind of managed by Gnosis Safe. So go check out Gnosis Safe. And second one, actually also a wallet, different kind of wallet. So Talley, which is a Web 3, DeFi wallet that's kind of like a community-owned Metamask alternative. So it's fully open source and fully DAO-governed, DAO controlled. The community additions out now and they're coming out with the full browser extension basically next week.

So go check it out at tally.cash. And with that, let's get to our episode about Helion. So 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 don't really like understand this. And we'd 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 wireless networks interesting? Yeah, good question. I mean, helium definitely sort of an odd one in the crypto space, like compared to others because we're doing the sort of physical world thing. And that's, we're not the only one, but certainly one of only very few. You know, the mission for helium really started way before our crypto adventure. Like we started the company to try and build basically a big sensor network, right? Like we wanted 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 kind of stuff that people describe as the intranet of things. And that was sort of the mission objective of the company. And it took us, you know, a few years 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. and the traditional approach

has spent many billions of dollars doing that, right? Which is what you see from like a traditional telco, whether it's AT&T or Vodafone or Orange or whatever. And then the new approach, which I think Helium is sort of pioneered here, is like don't own the network, right? Like 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 the, even the prior question. So you're saying like, you know, an IoT network, right? The network for these sensors to connect with. Like, why, are there a 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. At the time that we started the company, and I sort of mentioned this on another podcast last week, I think, but we actually happened 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 these guys had very specific problems that they were looking to solve.

One guy was building a connected baby monitor as 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 and 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, 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, you know, the Department of Forestry is someone that we've talked to about building wildfire sensors, for example, right? Like they want to know when fires start so they can put them out more quickly before they become like a blazing inferno. And so, you know, 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. 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 and B2B side okay cool and are there particular use cases that you're especially excited about I mean that the the wildfire one has always been super interesting to me just because it's it's frustrating 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 100 acres and like people's homes get destroyed and people die 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 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 You would know much more about literally everything you came into contact with. And I still find that to be a really interesting sort of universe of problems. And then, you know, 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 thought was the least well served or had the biggest sort of pain point. And so then you say cellular, because I was hearing, I think I heard like an old podcast of yours where you were asked that question. And then you were like basically talking about like, ah, that's really hard. And like I think you were asking about 5G. So how can you talk a little bit about that, 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 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. 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 we started with IoT 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, well, what about, you know, building a cellular network this way, right? Like, could you, could you have people deploy, you know, 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 problem, right? Like, the spectrum is owned by Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile and like these massive corporations and the multiple billions of dollars spent 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 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. So if you have an iPhone 11, 12, 13, or if you have any like modern galaxy device or 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 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 would it be, okay, I can get, you know, mobile phone number, mobile sort of, you know, relationship with, you know, Vodafone, 18T, you know, where T-Mobile, or helium, will it be like that kind of thing?

Or will it be more sort of like the backbone to other cellular networks? I expect it to initially be more on the sort of backbone side. Like, you know, most, it's kind of getting nerdy on like cell networks per 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 cellular network inside those venues and then they're sharing the data back with AT&T. And it's all very seamless for the consumer, right? Like for you, you're just on AT&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 sort of the modern day version of the 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. And it's obviously significantly cheaper. And it's going to be like located in places where it's just not feasible to put a cell tower for the most part. So it's going to be super interesting. It's a very different way to build a network. And I think that's just going to result in a network that's just very different. It's going to be much cheaper. And the coverage is going to be in places that you wouldn't usually expect.

And it's going to be 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 US is really the only modern country that has unlicensed. Oh, 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. 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, Dow or treasury or something that could be then basically buy 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 a Wu-Tang album or whatever. And it'll be awesome to think of it 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 band it together and like bought enough spectrum to go do it. Yeah. And I mean, I think the thing is, right, with an idea like that, and if you look at something like Tesla, then I think you have 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 this, like, gigantic valuation. It gives basically this almost, you know, unlimited stream of capital, right? 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 with something like constitution doll 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 I can most people also right 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. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the most interesting things about the space, actually, is that, like, everyone hates, like, the incumbent player. 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, universally, like, every country just hates these people.

Like, there's something just sort of built it. Even if the service is really good, you just are sort of, like, you're supposed to hate them. 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'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 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 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, you know, the UI, I think we did a pretty good job of like improving the UI for doing that. You know, like 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 U.S. companies that want to participate in that world, you know, like being a being a money transmitter or a money. exchanger is really tricky. And so there are things to like think about that I think make the experience difficult in like a fully decentralized way. But I think you can get pretty close 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 a modern phone and like you're up and running. And so lots of things. happening 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 try and tackle it. Even just two or three years ago, it would have been a nightmare, right? But now it's feasible and doable. And I think we've already sold something like 20,000 cellular hotspots already. And so that's already

starting to spread around the US. And I think it's going to start accelerating for the remainder of the year. Amazing. And then, And while we're at it, what about, you know, things like the broadband or can you do the physical wire networks also? Yeah, my expectation is that, like, technology is getting good enough that you can do away with the cable part completely, right? So, like, there are now, like, enough interesting projects, whether it's, like, Facebook's Tehragraph or there is, you know, a company called Tarana, for example. that are sort of working on this part religiously, right? Like how do I deliver like gigabit broadband to the home wirelessly in like some cost-effective way, right? Where I don't need, you know, a million transmitters in a city.

I need like 50. And, you know, so I think that's going to change. That kind of technology is going to change the way we think about delivering internet to the home. It doesn't need to be a cable like dug under the streets anymore, right? 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 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 wireless.

right so there's no there's no cable involved 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 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 can decentralize all you want at the app layer, like at the Web 3 sort of part. But 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 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 fascinated by by that part. And 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 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 and important part of that equation. Yeah, that was exactly what came up in my mind when you were speaking before, right? Because you, yeah, that 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's the field 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, you know, maybe some people who've working on, like, decentralized tour versions, right? There's this name thing and 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, you know, the name thing kind of makes sense to me for extending crypto transaction, but really you want to have the, you know, more fundamental decentralization, I think.

So that sounds really amazing now. Yeah. 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, like, Orchid is one of them and there's, like, a handful of others. 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 so 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 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, 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 shut down certain, you know, like sometimes you had countries shut down Facebook or social media, right, governments, if they were like, well, people are using that too much to. Is this something where you could build a much more kind of censorship?

resistant network that, you know, governments can't censor easily? I think it makes it harder. It sort of depends on the, like, level of, like, censorship, right? I mean, 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 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 improves the situation, but I don't think 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. But there's interesting stuff. I mean, like, you could deliver it from the sky, you know, 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, how are you going to, like, stop access to a satellite? Right. You'd have to go around and find every satellite. 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 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. Really excited about this. That is something that's very needed. Yeah. I mean, helium has grown, 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 hotspots to like 600,000 hotspots

with another like 3 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 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 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 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. But yeah, 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. thousands of cities, hundreds of countries, and I expect there to be three or four million hotspots on the network over the next 24 months.

Another way that I was sort of like thinking about helium a little bit that seemed interesting to me is, you know, Bitcoin you can also think of as it's this sort of economic, it's this incentive system that has bootstrapped also, you know, kind of the deployment of this, you know, physical network, where you have all these miners running these specialized machines, you know, that tend to be maybe more larger facilities, right, because they need to get cheap electricity and these economies of scale 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 these economies of scale, I think, in the same way that you have with like Bitcoin mining. So I'm, yeah, I'm curious, like, what do you think is the 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, 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 hotspots on the network are using the same physical, at least

components, like parts of the hotspot are all the same. 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 not been great, you know, because of COVID and chip shortages and like everything, which is affecting like multiple different industries. 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 get the same sort of economies of scale 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 private key. And, you know, so implicitly a wallet. Do you think that wallet, you know, these, how, do you think that wallet will have like usage beyond the kind of narrow function, it has an Enneedium 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 unique characteristics that are different. So I think it's interesting. Like they're arguably like there are some of the first like physical world like NFTs, right? And that's kind of an interesting idea. 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 et cetera, et cetera. 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 wall. wallet type things out there that you could probably do something with. I do think we're starting to have the conversation with lots of different projects similar to what you're describing, where there's a bunch of like DVPN projects, for example, who are like, okay, we'd be perfect

if we could run our VPN software on your like 600,000 hotspots because that's, you know, a pretty massive like VPN network all of a sudden, right? So 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 think we're going to start to see some really interesting things come out. But the VPN one is, like I said, always been interesting to me because I'm always so interested in privacy and anonymity. 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 helium nodes because it's sort of the perfect distribution of hardware for it. 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 a network look like? So, you know, you've talked about the wireless network, right? And then you have, you know, the cellular network, right, which you said, you know, different devices. So can you talk a bit about, you know, what is the architecture of the helium network? What are the different domain participants in the system and what are their roles? Yeah, so there's, I mean, 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 a completely sort of from scratch written blockchain network that doesn't build on top of anything else. And most of that is because we started this 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 we thought was going to be too expensive even back then. Or you were forking Bitcoin 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.

they stake 10,000 HNT, which is the HNT is the sort of native token on helium. So something like 35, 40% of the supply of HNT is staked in validators who run the network. And then you've got the hotspot hosts themselves. And I think the best way of thinking about hotspots is they're kind of like a combination of a crypto miner and a wireless access point, basically. Like 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 building. I mean, 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? and 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 hotspots transmit this is sort of encrypted data back and forth with each other, like this sort of challenge protocol. And the hotspots earn HNT for this work that they do, right? Like the sort of proof of coverage is the equivalent of proof of work in Bitcoin or something 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're on top of a cell tower or something, then you earn more than someone who just has it in their window at home, 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 network. And then the other side is users, which are people actually using the network. And so those today are mostly companies. And so they're companies like Salesforce and Volvo and Costco and Toyota and companies that actually run sensors on the helium network are the other sort of participant in the network. And they have to spend H&T in order to actually use the network.

And that money goes to that H&T goes to the hotspot hosts. So those are, you know, those are sort of the main three actors. You've got 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 kind of the same way, right? Like you'll have cellular hotspots that participate in cellular proof of coverage. And then there are 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 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 who those people are. With proof of courage, are there, you know, how secure is this? Are there like attacks in areas that somebody can,

you know, swoof things and trick hotspots? Yeah, I mean, it's an ongoing amount of work, right? I mean, as H&T has become valuable and as the network has become valuable, you know, like the attack surface has increased, right? like people have figured out ways to sort of trick the system or take advantage of like characteristics of the system that 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. 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 hotspots offline near your hotspot, then you get challenge. 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. All of them are built from scratch for better or for worse. And so, you know, it's a constantly sort of evolving process to sort of find these problems

and improve them and fix them and sort of think about. 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 involves community.

And that's, you know, that's kind of what we've ended up with. So, so yeah, it's certainly not perfect by any means, but it's heading in the right direction. And then do you see this as kind of like one, so first, example, HNT, you would use that same token for the wireless network and for the cell your 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 HNT, which is the main token that you earn for being a hotspot host. It's the thing that you see, you know, being exchanged. But if you want to use the network, there's actually a second token called a data credit. And that's kind of

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. 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. And the way that you acquire data credits is by destroying H&T. Right. So if you want, if you want data credits, you have to take H&T and like burn it. and the ratio of that changes, right? Because H&T's value is fluctuating. And so, you know, depending on how much H&T is worth, when you burn one H&T,

you end up with a different amount of data credits depending on what the value of H&T 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 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 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 reminds people of like cell phone minutes or airline miles or like something that they're something that they're really used to. I think with this system, right, in the end, uh, the interesting, amazing thing, right, is also that you have this, you know, the centrally owned, network. So of course, at that point, you know, governance also becomes interesting. So how do you, how does H&T or how does the network governance work today? And how do you see that evolve in the future? So there's a, uh, 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 it is that you want. And there's a voting process that is weighted using H&T. So people vote on whether they like these proposals or not. There's many proposals for like how to improve the proposal process. Or like the proposal process should be different. The governance process should be different. The voting process should be different. 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 blockchain network. works. And so that poses like a different kind of challenge. But yeah, I mean, again, I don't, I'm not, I don't think any blockchain network has figured out governance at all, like 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 coins that use like weighted stakes, like are dominated by whales who own all the currency. You know, None of it is like perfect.

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 today it's sort of the stake weighted process. And we've actually had a lot of like great improvement proposals come through the community that have been implemented. I think where it's 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. 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 passing proposals that can't 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 writing code against the project.

Yeah, that is also, I think, a hard thing to do in a kind of decentralized. right, right? Where even today, in most blockchains, 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 disconnect between proposals people make and then, you know, the team that actually builds the stuff.

Yeah, and I think it's, you know, it's an interesting problem, right? Because you, the team can only do so much, right? And so we have like a core development team already has a very massive backlog of 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, it's not always reasonable to expect that the core development team is just going to shift their priorities to work on that proposal. Right. And again, I think 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 to continue to like try and foster more of that like the helium foundation or that 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 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 to new projects is always a challenge. I mean, to be honest, I don't think there's any 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, so I don't think there's any blockchain where you're at the stage. I mean, 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 think Bitcoin has this problem like in a severe way, right? Like there's no, like if you're a distributed system slash blockchain engineer, you're highly incentivized to go work on like Solano or Avalanche or PolkaDod or, you know, because those guys have like massive treasury. They're 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. have bills to pay and lives to live and you know you can't just work on on on good vibes you know so like people have to like make money and that that's that's a challenge I think in all of these systems and mostly I've seen it solved through like grants you know so like there'll 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 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. But yeah, 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 single team. It's just, it's too much work and too fragmented. And is there also a kind of community pool or, you know, a mechanism where the community uses governance to directly fund work? We don't really have that today. But it's something that I would definitely like to see. And I think there are some good examples of other

projects that have done a good job of that. And so, yeah, I would love to see more of that going forward. But today, the sort of grants are managed by the foundation team, and they sort of decide how that goes and take input from the community 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 blockchain, other smart contracting? Because systems. Yeah, it's a thing that I wish was, it's one of the downsides of building your own thing. And at the time, I don't think there was a lot of alternative. Like, we sort of had to do it that way. But I would love for H&T 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 other chains. So there's a group working in an Algorand one. There's a group working in a Solano one. I'd love to see something on Ethereum. So I like the bridging approach. I mean, there's obviously been a few hacks and attacks on the bridges 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, the layer two sort of remain on helium as their own sort of miniature blockchains. Like there's a proposal like that in the community right now. Now, so we'll see, but 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 will, for example, if you think of something like this buying

spectrum idea, right? I mean, in essence, that's like a huge financial transaction. And then I think if you can do that sort of as part of this crypto financial system, that will, you know, unlock a lot of probably possibilities that, you know, can't have if you don't have those connections. It's a challenge for sure. I mean, it's, 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 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 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 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 Axler and wormhole and I think 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 IBC, but that's more work to implement, I think. Yeah, for sure. And 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. And so how that's implemented, I think remains to be seen. But I could see. I could see it being possible, but I think the purpose of the smart contracts would have to be quite precise. I don't think there's a whole lot of value in helium trying to be like another smart contract. Blockchain is already like so many of them that are focused just on doing that.

We'll certainly do it better than we could. So I think if there were smart contracts, it would have to be like specific to a purpose, like deploying wireless networks or deploying networks or deploying like distributed applications like that 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 Iota kind of reminds me of that, right? Like now it's sort of like another sort of, it's like an avalanche clone now. They don't really know what distinguishes something like Iota from Avalanche. And so I think you've 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.

can they could do a better job than we could. Yeah, that's a tricky. I think that's a sort of tricky balance. I mean, 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 of case.

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, comes away maybe a bit from this being very purpose-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 the 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 the thing that I probably worry about the most in the short term 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, because you're going to start, like, distributing H&T 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 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 definitely a concern that I have.

There's a lot of technical challenges that will face. I mean, I think helium is already the largest peer-to-peer network that has ever been built. I mean, it's like 600,000 nodes on a peer-to-peer network 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 at this size. Not that many have actually done it. And so there's that kind of stuff. I think we have the right roadmap already to sort of mitigate a lot of that. But, you know, just dealing with something at this scale is a huge undertaking. I think we've served something like $5 billion requests 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, 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 not really well understood. And so there are, you know, there are just their challenges there that we're facing and working through. But overall, I think I worry about them less than the economic challenges. Yeah, I think I can see that as being a hard problem, right? Because in the end, you're sort of using the expectation of the future returns, maybe after 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 sort of, 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 think, 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 you mean? And so 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 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 100,000 sensors, for example, is 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 just so many steps required to, like, actually make something work and then manufacture it. So that part is tricky. And so with the cellular network, you don't have the same problem. 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 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 you have in the IoT universe. And so, yeah, Yeah, so it's, you know, it's definitely a challenge that requires a lot of patience because you've got a 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 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 it go faster,

but I'm not convinced that there is 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 privacy 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 IoT

widely adopted while maintaining or maybe even improving people's privacy? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think the privacy concern is different than sort of the big internet privacy concern. To me, the big internet privacy concern is more like, you know, an ISP knows my browsing history and, you know, knows sort of everything that I do on the internet, at least

to some level. There's definitely a potential for a concern in the IoT space, or like if you have a lot of sensors all over the place, they could, for sure, it 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. But yeah, I mean, I think we always have to be cognizant 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 TVM. I think it is like just an amazing accomplishment. I think to build this like, you know, physical crypto-controlled network. out and I'm really excited about all the things that will become possible with it. I think also

that the intersection between crypto applications and having this physical network, I think, would be very powerful. So yeah, thanks so much for coming on, Amir. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm glad you're interested and excited about what helium is doing and super excited to see what comes next. Cool. Then thanks so much, Amir. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google Home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there,

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