Internet of Things public chain Helium is a decentralized wireless network infrastructure. Users can purchase their network hot spot devices and participate in the maintenance of the wireless network. They can get HNT tokens as payment.
Helium is a long-established public chain project that launched in 2019. In early 2022, The New York Times ran an article on Helium, which has been the subject of much media coverage in the currency community.
However, Coin circle projects aiming for social adoption often overstate the extent of their collaboration with Web2 companies in order to prove their usefulness.
Mashable recently reported that Helium had long claimed that scooter-sharing company Lime was a customer, but officials denied it.
Another company mentioned in the report, Saleforce, has also been removed from its official website, as has Lime.
Lime stated to Mashable: Aside from the initial testing of its product in 2019, Lime has no relationship with Helium and does not currently have one.
Lime executives tell Mashable that Lime only briefly tested Helium products in the summer of 2019, and has had no contact with Helium since, and that Lime was asked not to mention Lime in the publicity as a condition of participating in the test.
Lime also says that key contacts at the time had left two and a half years ago and they didn’t know the details of the test.
Lime’s primary contact is probably Eddie Li, the main operations manager who left two years and five months ago. He was a Helium webinar as a former Lime employee.
When the host asked if Lime had implemented the Helium device, Eddie Li said that after testing it, there must have been some value at the time, it just didn’t end up being implemented with Helium.
In an interview with Mashable, EddieLi says that Lime’s testing with Helium didn’t involve contracts or money at the time. The goal was to find a better way to track a scooter, and that Helium’s technology is unique and accurate.
He’s just not sure why Helium placed Lime’s logo on their website.
In addition, Helium has mentioned its partnership with Helium several times in official articles and on Twitter.
Helium, which has changed its name to Nova Labs, responded: Nova Labs has partnered with Lime at its San Francisco headquarters.
They tested Lime scooters through the Helium network using LoRa WAN tracking devices to find lost or stolen scooters, and were impressed with the accuracy and wide coverage of the sensors.
Lime has since restructured and the team members who worked with us are no longer there.
Helium is an Internet of Things company that started in 2013 and didn’t introduce blockchain and token economy until 2019. Mashable describes its wireless network business model as struggling until it introduced cryptocurrency revenue into its service.
According to Crunchbase, after Helium introduced the blockchain and token economy theme in 2019, its funding volume and investors improved dramatically, reaching $200 million in February 2022.
Well-known coin circle venture capital a16z, Tiger Global Management and so on are investors.
However, can the introduction of a token economy and successful financing lead to product success?
We media The Generalist recently wrote a long analysis, saying that the revenue of Helium network participants is not as good as it used to be, and the revenue of the protocol itself is not much.
Helium has had infrastructure manufacturers that cheat in an attempt to make more money, just like the game that is popular in the past.
Despite the influx of hot devices and the addition of Data Credits to sustain the token economy, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the demand for network usage.