Helium Network

TLDR: Helium is the original and largest Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) wireless network. Operators deploy hotspots that provide real wireless coverage and earn HNT tokens in return. Since migrating its entire state to Solana in April 2023, Helium has matured from a hardware-sales experiment into a commercial network generating tens of millions in annual revenue from enterprise IoT clients and major telecom carriers routing traffic through community hotspots.

What Helium Does

Helium turns wireless coverage into a token-incentivized marketplace. Instead of a single telecom company building towers, thousands of individual operators deploy small hotspot devices in homes, businesses, and public spaces. Those hotspots provide two distinct types of wireless connectivity:

IoT LoRaWAN Network: Helium operates the world's largest LoRaWAN network, spanning more than 170 countries. Long-range, low-power LoRaWAN signals are ideal for sensors, asset trackers, agricultural monitors, logistics devices, and smart-city applications — anywhere that a device needs to transmit small bursts of data over a wide area without a SIM card or expensive cellular contract. Enterprises pay for network access using Data Credits (DC), a USD-pegged utility token created exclusively by burning HNT.

Mobile Carrier Offload Network: The second layer is a distributed Wi-Fi network that allows participating mobile carriers to offload their subscribers' traffic onto Helium hotspots when a user is in range. When an AT&T or Movistar subscriber's phone connects to a Helium hotspot, the carrier pays Helium in DC, and the hotspot operator earns a share of MOBILE token rewards. This turns existing consumer Wi-Fi routers into revenue-generating nodes.

How the Economics Work

The foundational token is HNT, with a maximum supply of approximately 223 million and a two-year halving schedule. The network launched with no pre-mine on July 29, 2019. On August 1, 2025, the network underwent its third halving, cutting annual emissions from 15 million HNT to 7.5 million HNT (roughly 20,548 HNT per day). Emissions continue to tighten on a fixed schedule, reducing long-term inflation pressure as real network revenue grows.

Helium's burn-and-mint equilibrium links token value to actual network usage. To use the network — whether routing IoT sensor data or offloading a carrier subscriber's traffic — operators must burn HNT to create Data Credits. The protocol also runs a net-emissions mechanism that re-mints a small amount of burned HNT (capped at 1,643.84 HNT daily) to ensure rewards never reach zero, even after halvings.

Two subnetwork tokens distribute rewards within their respective verticals:

• IOT rewards operators of the LoRaWAN IoT network.
• MOBILE rewards operators of the Wi-Fi carrier offload network.

Both IOT and MOBILE are SPL tokens on Solana Mainnet. A community-approved Helium Improvement Proposal (HIP-13) introduced a consolidation pathway, allowing holders to migrate these subDAO tokens back to HNT as the ecosystem matures toward a single-token model.

Proof of Coverage

Hotspot operators are not simply trusted to claim they are online and providing coverage. Helium uses a Proof of Coverage (PoC) challenge system in which hotspots are periodically asked to prove their location and signal quality by witnessing challenges issued by or to neighboring hotspots. Rewards are tied to verified coverage rather than self-reported uptime, aligning operator incentives with actual network utility.

Solana Migration

In April 2023, Helium migrated from its own purpose-built L1 blockchain to Solana — one of the most ambitious state migrations in crypto history. The catalyst was scale: Helium's original chain handled roughly 10 TPS, while the network had grown to nearly one million registered hotspots. Managing multiple wireless standards and token economies on a proprietary chain proved unwieldy as the 5G mobile layer was added.

Solana's state compression technology made the migration economically viable. Helium minted approximately one million hotspot NFTs using compressed NFTs, reducing per-hotspot minting costs by several orders of magnitude compared to standard NFTs — to roughly $0.50–$1.00 each. These NFTs function as credentials, verifying hotspot authenticity and supplying developers with on-chain data. The migration unlocked composability with Solana DeFi protocols and opened Helium's tokens to the broader Solana ecosystem. Post-migration, the network processes transactions at 1,600+ TPS compared to the original chain's 10 TPS ceiling.

Real Revenue, Real Partners

The clearest sign of Helium's maturity is its revenue trajectory. In January 2026, the network reported $24 million in revenue — combining enterprise data credit purchases from IoT clients in logistics, agriculture, and smart cities with carrier offload payments from telecom partners. Helium Mobile alone reached $2.5 million in monthly revenue by March 2026, with carrier offload accounting for 57% of that figure.

Carrier partnerships have been the primary growth driver for the mobile layer. In February 2025, Telefonica's Movistar Mexico brought 2.3 million subscribers onto the Helium offload network. In April 2025, AT&T became the first major U.S. carrier to join the program — a significant legitimacy milestone. By Q3 2025, cumulative carrier offload data had reached 5,451 TB, up 100% quarter-over-quarter from 2,721 TB at the end of Q2.

Beyond telecoms, 34 national restaurant chains use Helium connectivity at their locations, hotel and casino operators monetize existing Wi-Fi infrastructure through the Helium network, and the city of Redondo Beach deployed Helium hotspots to resolve waterfront dead zones, serving over 2,000 daily users from major carriers.

Network Scale

By the end of 2025, the network was connecting nearly 2.5 million daily users across major U.S. venues and international markets. More than 400,000 hotspots are actively earning rewards, with over one million registered on-chain across 170+ countries. Helium Mobile had accumulated nearly 700,000 total subscriber sign-ups by mid-2026. Geographic expansion has extended Helium's footprint into Latin America through the Movistar partnership, a dedicated ISP program for Mexican internet service providers, and ongoing European coverage growth.

Legal Clarity

In April 2025, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dismissed its lawsuit against Helium with prejudice — the strongest form of dismissal available. The ruling established that HNT, MOBILE, and IOT tokens, and Helium hotspot devices, are not securities under U.S. law. This provides meaningful regulatory clarity for operators, enterprises, and token holders across the United States.

Governance

Helium is governed by its community through Helium Improvement Proposals (HIPs). Major protocol changes — including the Solana migration, the subDAO structure, and the token consolidation plan — were each passed by community vote. Token holders stake HNT as veHNT (vote-escrowed HNT), with voting power weighted by lockup duration, to participate in governance decisions and direct subDAO reward emissions.

Solana Fit

Helium is one of the few crypto projects to demonstrate that physical infrastructure can be governed and incentivized through on-chain mechanisms at scale. Its two live programs on Solana Mainnet — the IoT subDAO (porcSnvH9pvcYPmQ65Y8qcZSRxQBiBBQX7UV5nmBegy) and the Mobile subDAO (memMa1HG4odAFmUbGWfPwS1WWfK95k99F2YTkGvyxZr) — process real coverage rewards for hundreds of thousands of operators daily. The integration with Hivemapper, which uses Helium hotspots to verify driver locations, illustrates the composability that the Solana migration unlocked. For the Solana ecosystem, Helium is the flagship proof that DePIN converts real-world wireless infrastructure into verifiable on-chain activity — and that the model generates genuine revenue at scale.