How Helium demonstrates crypto’s utility
A wireless network inspired by lost drones is now helping telco carriers reach your phone indoors
Artwork by Crystal Le
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“Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility.”
— Thomas Edison
The first idea that put Helium co-founders Amir Haleem and Shawn Fanning (of Napster fame) on the long road to building a decentralized, crypto-powered mobile network had nothing to do with decentralization, crypto or mobile networks.
Instead, they were looking for a way to keep track of the very expensive drones they kept losing over windy San Francisco.
It’s not surprising that it turned into something else — the tech industry has a rich history of unintended consequences resulting from such brainstorming.
YouTube was launched on Valentine’s Day, 2005, as a video-based dating site: “Tune in, hook up.”
Shopify began as a website selling snowboards.
Instagram was originally a location check-in app called Burbn.
This is why it’s commonplace for VCs to say that they invest in founders, not ideas.
They have no alternative, really.
“In the beginning of a startup,” Marc Andreessen notes, “you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn’t been built yet.”
The job of early-stage funding is to give founders room to wander their way to a product.
In the case of Helium, that wandering process was funded by crypto enthusiasts.
Founded way back in 2012, Helium has long been one of the few examples crypto enthusiasts could cite as evidence the industry might produce something other than yet more ways to trade crypto.
For most of that time, it remained an aspirational example.
Helium’s original business plan (inspired by those lost drones) was to use crypto tokens to crowdsource the buildout of a wireless network for sensors, trackers and other “internet of things” gadgets.
It succeeded: The network is up and running.
But it hasn’t generated the kind of revenue that Thomas Edison would say proves its utility.
Also, the internet of things isn’t much of a topic anymore.
Helium’s pivot to mobile services, however, is becoming more and more of one — and recent sales are proof that the network which has been built has utility.
In a recent report for Blockworks Research, Nick Carpinito cites the “explosive growth in Data Credit (DC) burn” as a reason to be optimistic about both Helium and its token, HNT.
Data credits are how users pay to access the Helium network, so their “burn” is one measure of how useful they think the network is.
They appear to be finding it more and more useful: “The monthly DC burn rate attributed to mobile usage recently surged from ~$189,000 in early March 2025 to ~$361,000 in June 2025,” Carpinito wrote.
Most of that comes from carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile which pay to route traffic through Helium hotspots when their customers lose signal indoors.
This is a cheaper, more effective way for the carriers to provide coverage in buildings that their cell towers struggle to penetrate.
It’s a rare example of real-world companies paying to use something built with crypto-based incentives.
But it’s not just about token incentives.
When a customer of, say, AT&T connects to the Helium network, a Solana-based smart contract keeps a record of how much data is transferred and then facilitates payment (in the HNT token), between two crypto wallets.
Sometimes this is facilitated by Nova Labs, the company that developed the Helium network, but the smart contracts are open to anyone who wants to integrate directly with the network, as I’m told Telefonica is now doing in Mexico.
This, I think, is crypto at its best: enabling all-new economic activity, incentivized with tokens, that’s managed on a blockchain and accessible to anyone.
You can’t beat free
In his note for Blockworks, Carpinito focuses mostly on carrier offload as a source of growth for Helium.
But Frank Mong of Nova Labs, the company that developed the Helium network, seems more excited about the plans that Helium Mobile offers to individuals.
In a recent conversation, Mong (who also related the above drone anecdote to me) highlighted that Helium Mobile has recently been adding as many as 2,000 subscribers a day.
Importantly, the cost to Helium Mobile of acquiring these customers has been unusually low: just $10 to $15 per customer, according to Mong — vs. the $100+ that it costs its traditional competitors.
“There’s magic here,” Mong told me.
It’s not hard to figure out the trick, though: Helium offers a free mobile plan.
(It might even be less than free, after earning rewards for data sharing.)
I assume that’s a loss leader for Nova Labs, which runs Helium Mobile, but those are all customers who can be upsold on paid plans or monetized in other ways.
Mong’s near-term ambition is to get to a million such customers using the Helium-branded network, and also a million gateways providing the WiFi they connect to.
That would still be small, relative to telco giants like AT&T and T-Mobile, but huge by crypto standards.
Mong is not measuring Helium as a crypto business, however.
“I think we can dominate the telco industry,” he told me.
And maybe other things too.
“Our aspirations are bigger than providing internet access,” Mong told me.
He wouldn’t be pressed on specifics, which is wise: The history of tech startups demonstrates that they rarely go where their founders expect them to.
Also, this is crypto: You can just build a network and see what people do with it.
Helium has invented something that sells (to paraphrase Edison), and that is much needed proof that crypto can have real utility.
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