Helium: Laying the Foundation For a Telecom Network Deployment Platform

Key Insights

• For Helium to scale beyond an IoT network, the network’s architecture and economic design need to be reconstructed. The proposed changes aim to restructure the Helium Network into a decentralized platform where any type of telecom network can easily be deployed.
• HIP 51 proposes transitioning from a monolithic blockchain to a modular blockchain structure. It also introduces subDAOs as subnetworks, where each decentralized telecom protocol will live on its own independent network (e.g., LoRaWAN network becomes a LoRaWAN subDAO).
• Each subDAO will have its own token which would allow it to have control over its PoC rules, data transfer pricing, miner rewards, and governance.

The notion of “build it and they will come” has long been a fallacy among traditional startups until crypto entered the scene. Helium, an economic system for building wireless distributed networks, is a perfect example of this approach. Helium began building out its supply-side before focusing on its demand-side. It planned to grow large enough to attract users by first coordinating global activity through crypto incentives. That’s exactly what Helium demonstrated with its LoRaWAN IoT network, which grew from 15,000 active hotspots in January 2021 to currently over 787,000, with roughly 3.5 million hotspots on backorder. Helium then saw several network partnerships with IoT companies and numerous products built on the IoT network including applications in agriculture, supply chain logistics, and environmental monitoring.

Helium’s goal is to replicate the IoT network’s success onto numerous other telecom networks including 5G, WiFi, VPN, and CDN. However, the core team at Nova Labs (previously Helium Inc.) and the community at the Helium Foundation (previously Decentralized Wireless Alliance) realized the network’s original architecture and economic design were not properly built to scale across numerous telecom networks. In order for Helium to scale beyond a LoRaWAN network, the network’s construction and economic model need to change. Transitioning the network’s architecture away from a monolithic blockchain to a modular blockchain structure would allow any type of telecom network to launch on Helium. This would essentially turn Helium into a network of telecom networks.

The Helium DAO