Helium Network

Helium Network is a wireless network built by its users and run on Solana. Venues and individuals connect Wi-Fi access points or LoRaWAN hotspots, and the network pays them in its token, HNT, for the traffic they carry. It has two parts. The Wi-Fi side lets carriers such as AT&T move phones onto venue Wi-Fi indoors, where cell signal is weak. The IoT side gives low-power sensors a way to send small readings without a SIM card. As of October 2026, Helium's website said more than a million people a day connect through the network. Most of them never notice the switch.

How does the Helium Network work?

The Helium Network pays the people who give coverage and charges the people who use it. Users pay in Data Credits, which you make by burning HNT. Burning means the HNT is destroyed for good. Hotspot hosts earn HNT for the data they carry.

Each Data Credit is fixed at $0.00001, say the Helium docs. How much HNT you burn for one depends on the HNT price, read from a Pyth Network PYTH$0.067+4.0% price feed. You can't send Data Credits to another wallet once they exist. They work like a prepaid fee for using the network.

Since 29 July 2026, Helium pays only for data that gets delivered. HIP-149 passed a veHNT vote in July 2026 and went live at the end of that month. It ended Proof-of-Coverage on both networks. That old system paid hotspots for proving where they were, used or not. Now Mobile hosts share rewards by the bytes they deliver. Pay is held between a floor and a cap set against the rate carriers pay Nova Labs. IoT data pricing did not change.

Helium Wi-Fi offload: why your phone connects to Helium Wi-Fi

If your phone joined a "Helium" Wi-Fi network in a store or airport, your carrier sent it there. Venues on the Helium Network use Passpoint. It is a Wi-Fi standard that lets phones join on their own, with no app, password or sign-in page. When you walk out, the phone goes back to cellular.

Carriers pay Nova Labs, the firm that builds Helium, by the gigabyte for this traffic. AT&T signed on in April 2025. Telefónica's Movistar began rolling it out in Mexico. Brazil comes next, through partners such as Mambo Wi-Fi, CEO Mario Di Dio said at a June 2026 fireside chat.

Helium's venues include a 23-hospital US health system and the first stores of Wakefern, the grocery co-op behind ShopRite. In New York, Madison Square Garden and Grand Central joined too. Helium's pitch is cost. Wi-Fi the building already has does the job of a costly indoor antenna system.

Helium Plus: how to join the Helium Network and earn HNT

Helium Plus is how a business with existing Wi-Fi joins the Helium Network. You enable carrier offload on your current access points through a software setup, and you get paid when carrier phones use your Wi-Fi. Payouts come in HNT or US dollars.

To qualify, your Wi-Fi needs Passpoint and gear Helium supports, such as Ubiquiti. You don't need new hardware. Helium Plus is aimed at restaurants, gyms, hotels and concert venues. It also targets the firms that run Wi-Fi for them. One such firm, SignaConnect, runs the Wakefern stores.

Pay depends on how much carrier traffic your venue carries. More access points alone won't raise it. A busy store with lots of carrier phones earns far more than a quiet back office.

Helium IoT network: LoRaWAN coverage for sensors and trackers

The Helium IoT network is a LoRaWAN network. LoRaWAN is a long-range, low-power radio standard for devices that send small amounts of data now and then: soil sensors, asset trackers, water meters. Devices pay per message in Data Credits, and the hotspots that relay their packets earn HNT.

Pricing is per 24 bytes of payload: one message of up to 24 bytes costs one Data Credit, per the same Helium docs page. That makes it cheap for battery-powered sensors that report a few times an hour. It is the wrong tool for anything that streams, calls or browses.

The IoT network was Helium's original product and still runs, but Nova Labs' public focus in 2026 is Wi-Fi offload. HIP-149 left the IoT side's Data Credit pricing unchanged.

HeliumOS and WOX for carriers and MVNOs

HeliumOS is the software Nova Labs sells to phone companies and venues. It launched on 1 September 2026. It bundles subscriber sign-ups, SIM setup, billing, a Passpoint Wi-Fi toolkit and HeliumAI data dashboards. Its buyers are carriers, venues and MVNOs, the phone brands that rent a big carrier's network. Affiniti Ventures, the firm behind Noble Mobile and Helium Mobile, was the first customer. Our launch coverage has more.

The part carriers ask about most is WOX, short for Wi-Fi Offload Experience. Before your phone joins a venue's Wi-Fi, WOX checks the Wi-Fi against the cell signal. If the Wi-Fi is better, you connect. If not, you stay on cellular. Carriers set the rules and can watch each session live.

For data teams, Helium moved its Mobile network data to Apache Iceberg tables in October 2026. Anyone can query them with SQL for free. The old S3 files were due to be retired on 1 November 2026.

Helium Mobile vs the Helium Network

Helium Mobile is a phone plan. The Helium Network is what it runs on. Since June 2026 they belong to different firms. On 2 June 2026, Noble Mobile, the phone brand founded by Andrew Yang, bought Helium Mobile from Nova Labs. The price was not made public.

Helium Mobile still rides on T-Mobile's network. Where a Helium hotspot is close, your phone can use that instead. Noble Mobile users get the same Helium coverage. Plans, prices and support for Helium Mobile now sit with Noble, at heliummobile.com.

The old MOBILE and IOT tokens are no longer issued. Since HIP 138 took effect on 29 January 2025, HNT has been the only reward on both networks.

HNT token: supply, Data Credit burns and HIP-149 emissions

HNT is the one token of the Helium Network, an SPL token on Solana. Hosts earn it and data users burn it. Holders can lock it as veHNT to vote on Helium Improvement Proposals, or HIPs. HNT launched in 2019 with no pre-mine. Its issuance halves every two years, per Helium's HNT page, with halvings on 1 August in odd years, per the HNT docs.

HIP-149 adds a large, fixed-term top-up on top of the halving schedule. The HIP itself sets out the supplement and supply numbers:

The extra HNT goes into a Squads multisig vault that Nova Labs runs. It pays for carrier growth, deployer programs, engineering, grants and legal work. A seven-seat Advisory Council keeps watch. HNT voters elect five seats and Nova Labs picks two. The council can't stop the mint itself. It can call a veHNT vote, and a simple majority in that vote can cut, pause or stop the extra HNT. Raising it takes a new HIP with a two-thirds vote.

At Breakpoint 2025, Helium said more HNT was being burned than issued. The HIP-149 supplement makes that much harder to match while it runs. Live price, supply and burn data are on our HNT token page.

Is the Helium Network safe? Risks, upgrade authority and history

For phone users, Helium Wi-Fi is a Passpoint link that your carrier sets up. It uses the same standard carriers use on other Wi-Fi. For HNT holders and hotspot hosts, the risks are control, dilution and pay.

Helium's Solana programs can be changed. On 2 November 2026, Solscan showed the Sub DAO and Data Credits programs as upgradeable. One account (pULUgs…r3U) holds the right to upgrade both, and Solscan labels it a multisig. It does not show who signs or how many must agree. Solscan also marks both programs as not verified against public code. We found no audit report in the helium-program-library repo, though it has a security policy.

Other risks to weigh:

• Dilution. In its first year, HIP-149 mints about 196,000 extra HNT a day. That is close to ten times the regular rate. Nova Labs controls it, with the council watching.
• One company at the centre. Nova Labs signs the carrier deals, sets the rate hosts are paid against, and gets the extra HNT.
• Pay. Rewards follow carrier traffic, so a quiet spot earns little. The rules also change by vote. HIP-150, a draft from August 2026, would add location boosts and a pay floor.
• Fake tokens. Other tokens use the HNT ticker on Solana. The real mint is hntyVP6YFm1Hg25TN9WGLqM12b8TQmcknKrdu1oxWux.

Helium has a past to weigh too. In 2022, reporters questioned its claims about Lime and Salesforce as customers, and Helium disputed the reports. In January 2025 the SEC sued Nova Labs, claiming HNT, MOBILE and IOT were unregistered securities and that it had misled investors about brand partners. In April 2025 it dropped the securities claims. Nova Labs settled the rest for $200,000 without admitting fault.

Who the Helium Network is for

Helium fits busy buildings with good Wi-Fi and bad cell signal. Think hospitals, grocery stores, hotels, airports and stadiums. If you get thousands of visitors a day, Helium Plus can pay you for Wi-Fi you already own. You need no new hardware.

It also suits carriers that want indoor coverage without building it. And it suits teams with fleets of small sensors that send a few bytes at a time.

It suits home users far less. A hotspot in a quiet street now earns only for the data that passes through it. There is no longer a reward for just being there.

If you hold HNT, know who sets the supply. The halving schedule still runs, but HIP-149 votes and the Advisory Council now matter just as much.

Helium alternatives and competitors

For phone coverage indoors, Helium's main rival is the antenna system big venues install for carriers, known as a DAS. Helium says it wins on cost. In June 2026, Di Dio put the cost of old-style indoor cell coverage at 12 to 15 times that of using Wi-Fi. The catch is reach. A DAS works for every phone on a carrier. Helium only works for carriers that have signed with Nova Labs.

For IoT, the closest match is The Things Network. It is a community LoRaWAN network with no token. Helium pays its hotspot hosts and charges per message. On The Things Network, people and firms run their own gateways for free. Meshtastic shows up in the same searches. It is an off-grid chat mesh for people, so it does not carry carrier or sensor traffic.

Helium history: from LoRa gateways to Solana

Helium, Inc. was founded in 2013, with Amir Haleem among its founders. At first it placed LoRa gateways in buildings itself. Later it changed tack: anyone could buy a hotspot and earn tokens for coverage. HNT launched with the network in 2019. The company took the name Nova Labs in March 2022.

In April 2023, after a community vote, Helium shut its own blockchain and moved to Solana. HNT and all network records moved with it. Data Credit burns and reward claims are now plain Solana transactions.

In 2026 the company changed shape. In June, Haleem stepped down as CEO to become chairman. Mario Di Dio, who ran the networks team, took over. That month Nova Labs also sold Helium Mobile to Noble Mobile. HIP-149 rewrote the rewards in July. HeliumOS followed in September. Nova Labs now sells network and software to carriers. It no longer runs a phone plan.