Helium Network HNT$0.212-12.1% carried less paid traffic in the third quarter of 2026 but reached more buildings, according to its Q3 2026 Tokenholder Report. The network settled $718K of Data Credits, down from $3.35M in Q2, while access points at active sites rose 33% to 53,300. HNT issuance climbed to 13.58M from 2.02M as a new operations supplement began minting.
Blockworks Advisory wrote the report, and the cover says it "has been funded by Nova Labs, Inc.", the company that builds Helium. Blockworks Advisory says the sponsor "may have input on the content" but that it keeps editorial control. Blockworks shared the report on 13 November 2026. Every figure below comes from the report unless stated otherwise.
Why Helium's Data Credits fell 79% to $718K in Q3 2026
Most of the drop in Helium's Q3 revenue comes from a price cut, and the rest from losing one source of traffic. Data Credits are the dollar-priced units carriers pay with when their subscribers' phones use Helium's network, and they are created by burning HNT. In early June, under HIP-143, the rate carriers pay moved from $0.50 per gigabyte to about $0.10, a change the Q2 report describes. Two of Q2's three months still cleared at $0.50. Q3 was the first quarter at the new rate from start to finish.
Traffic volume separates the two effects. Rewarded mobile data, the traffic carriers pay for and deployers earn on, fell 21% to 6,977 TB from 8,780 TB in Q2. A 21% volume decline against a 79% fall in settled dollars puts most of the dollar drop on the rate change, with lower volume accounting for the smaller part.
The volume that did go missing left on one day. On 31 August, the report says, a pilot with a third-party integrator that routed traffic from a US carrier disconnected. That carrier had supplied 47% of rewarded data across July and August. Rewarded data averaged 87.8 TB a day in July and August and 51.0 TB a day in September, a 42% step down. Monthly Data Credit settlement followed: about $290K in July, about $270K in August and $159K in September. Daily active users fell from 2.60M to 1.54M across the same split, and the report says usage held at about 1.6M through early October.
Neither the integrator nor the carrier is named. The report says the network's primary paid carrier, which deals with Helium directly, supplied about 63% of rewarded data in Q3, up from 52%, and that its daily traffic rose 13% in September from August. Helium said on its 2 September community call that talks about a direct connection with the carrier that left are still going on. The report's own verdict on the model is blunt: "Concentration is the main exposure."
Helium CEO Mario Di Dio's letter in the report says the remaining demand runs through direct carrier relationships and that "the Network is running on a stronger, more sustainable model". The letter calls Q2 "the reset" and Q3 "the first steps of rebuild".
Helium access points rise 33% as hospitals, a college stadium and city Wi-Fi join
Helium's physical footprint grew even as its traffic shrank. Access points at active sites, which include partner-reported counts, rose from about 40,100 at the end of Q2 to 53,300 at the end of Q3, the report says. Helium's own post about the report leads with the same 33% figure. The growth came from venues putting Wi-Fi they already run onto the network, so carriers can move subscribers' phones onto that Wi-Fi indoors, a practice called offload.
A single venue can add thousands of access points, according to the report. Bryant-Denny Stadium, the 100,077-seat home of Alabama's Crimson Tide, added 2,296 and carried its first game day on 26 September. A multi-state health system put 28 locations online, including 23 hospitals, which we covered when Helium first disclosed it. Mustang Public Schools in Oklahoma, 243 hotels, resorts and casinos, and the municipal Wi-Fi of Celina, Texas, also joined. After the quarter closed, the first Wakefern supermarkets went live.
Access points and traffic moved in opposite directions. Network authenticators carrying traffic, the devices that verify sessions behind a site's access points, averaged 12,973 a day in Q3, down from 14,502 in Q2, and stepped down in September with the integrator exit, the report says.
HNT deployer rewards per gigabyte rise to 0.255 under HIP-149 and HIP-150
People who run Helium sites earned far more HNT for each gigabyte they carried. Deployers earned 0.255 HNT per rewardable gigabyte in Q3, up from 0.143 HNT in Q2, and the monthly figure climbed from 0.137 HNT in June to 0.368 HNT in September, the report says.
Two governance votes set that up. HIP-149, which passed on 2 July, moved rewards to a usage basis and set a target minimum for deployer earnings of half the payer rate, or $0.05 per gigabyte today. When rewards fall short, the protocol re-emits HNT that was already burned for the same data, which the report says adds nothing to total supply. HIP-150, approved on 31 August, raised that minimum to 80% of the payer rate for about one to two years and added per-site multipliers of up to 5x at busy venues, as we covered when the draft was published. Nova Labs is funding part of the higher minimum by redirecting its own Service Provider rewards to deployers through at least July 2027.
Total deployer rewards rose to 2.03M HNT from 1.47M, according to the report. Helium's post cites a different figure, 1.78M HNT, up 41% from Q2. The report does not contain the 1.78M number, and neither source explains the gap.
HNT burned to create Data Credits fell to about 3 million from about 4.4 million, a 32% drop against the 79% fall in settled dollars. The report explains that Data Credits are fixed in US dollars, so the amount of HNT burned for each dollar depends on the conversion rate at the time of the burn.
HIP-149 supplement lifts HNT issuance to 13.58M and max supply to about 347M
The biggest change in HNT's supply came from the operations and growth supplement. According to the report, HIP-149 authorized about 141M HNT over 36 months, minted into a vault that Nova Labs administers, with oversight from a seven-seat Advisory Council. Minting began on 6 August at 193,550 HNT a day to the vault, plus 2,450 HNT a day to the Council's five community seats. Over 56 minting days in Q3, the vault received 10.84M HNT and the community seats 137K.
That is why HNT issuance reached 13.58M in Q3 against 2.02M in Q2, nearly seven times as much, the report shows. Issuance outside the supplement was 2.60M HNT. The vault's 10.84M for the quarter is more than five times the 2.03M paid to deployers. The report says the supplement lifts HNT's effective maximum supply from roughly 206M to roughly 347M. Circulating supply rose to 192.7M from 182.2M at the end of Q2; the report does not say how much of the vault's HNT counts as circulating. HNT's on-chain supply has kept rising since the quarter closed: Solana Compass token data puts it at about 202 million on 14 November 2026, with more than 540,000 wallets holding the token.
The schedule is front-loaded. The report says minting runs at a flat rate for about 12 months and then tapers to zero over the following 24. By our arithmetic, a full year at 193,550 HNT a day comes to about 70.6M HNT, half the authorized total. The supplement ends at the earliest of a community vote to dissolve it, its full distribution, or Nova Labs declining further distributions. The Advisory Council has "NDA-level visibility" into how the vault is spent and can demand disclosure, publish dissent and trigger a vote to end the supplement.
HNT is a Solana token, so the supplement's minting, the Data Credit burns and HNT staking all settle on Solana, the chain Helium had already moved to before the HIP-149 vote.
What to watch in Helium's Q4 2026 numbers
The report names its own measures for the coming quarters: rewarded data per day against September's 51.0 TB, the number of paying carrier relationships, uptake of HIP-150 multipliers at premium venues, and adoption of HeliumOS, the carrier software Helium launched on 1 September. Two other things will show whether the September base holds: whether the direct connection with the carrier that left goes ahead, and what the Advisory Council publishes about how the supplement vault's HNT is used.
