2021 Helium Interview Frank Mong! New Updates, VC, staking, Helium Network.

hey guys it's bill back again and it's 2021. thank god we made it through 2020. um look i wanted to bring back one of our most popular guests and that's frank mong from uh helium and he's here to talk up to us about all the in the uh increases in the helium network the token metrics the uh improvement plans that have been happening over the past year or so and really this is one of those projects that we caught early on made sense there was a lot of high um high attention around the investors that were involved but really we saw what we thought would be you know groundbreaking technology and i'm staring at my helium device right now and i'm happy about it i'm happy that it's been running for the past year so frank um you need no introduction here but let's let's hear a little bit about yourself quickly and then we can go into kind of the improvements and the different um events that have been taking place on the healing network no thanks bill appreciate it thanks for having me back sure um it's good to see you you haven't changed since 2008 i think your hair grew a little bit but that's it a little bit a little bit you know coveted haircuts it's hard to come by so yeah well look for everyone that's new to your channel uh certainly new to helium my name is frank mong i'm the chief operating officer at helium i've been with the company for over three years now background wise i've spent the last 20 25 years in cyber security in various roles in business development and marketing leadership but three years ago made the best change career-wise in my life by joining helium joining amir haleem and the rest of the team a quick intro for helium again i know many of you have already heard this before but helium is a series c startup backed by silicon valley heavyweights companies started by amir haleem and sean fanning of napster and the company started about eight years ago now the mission from day one when mark benioff and coastal ventures back the company was and this is eight years ago was to create a network that's ubiquitous around the world that can connect iot devices very cheaply and in a very open way that mission has been the same mission through our series b funding with google ventures who love that and more recently not that recent anymore back in 2019 our series c round was led by union square ventures in multi-coin capital and that's roughly three years ago or so three and a half years ago or so is when we figured out that to build a network to provide coverage ubiquitously around the world helium can't do it helium is a company can't do it alone as a individual company as a centralized entity we we've sort of seen history uh in the past of people who tried that companies like ricochet back in the 90s and then in the 2000s companies like meraki and they were lucky they got bought by cisco all had aspirations of creating either city-wide wi-fi or or city-wide network coverage using unlicensed spectrum and so as helium thought through this path we really had no way of doing this and blockchain became a critical piece of technology that came at the right time for us three years three and a half years ago in 2018 2019 blockchain bitcoin ethereum in 2018 2017 became a household word we thought what if we could put ethereum or bitcoin or something into our our hotspots into our or iot gateways maybe if we did that we could somehow co-op the individuals consumers around the world to build a network to connect little internet of things and they would own and operate it so it's kind of like a airbnb model except airbnb doesn't own this and air b you know in this case helium doesn't know any of it we open source it all it's owned by individuals owned and operated by bill by me and whoever anyone listening here who is participating and we call it the people's network but the way it works is you know i actually might even have a little like highly sought after helium hotspot these are sold out unfortunately but this is the we call it the og hotspot this is the original hotspot but we built this when bill talked to me in august of 2019 when we first launched to do two things one it mines the cryptocurrency hnt which is the helium blockchain and we couldn't use bitcoin or ethereum or any other crypto we wish we could because of our primitive like these things operate individually and they need to be able to identify themselves to blockchain talk to blockchain and prove that they're providing coverage which we call proof of coverage poc and so those primitives and ideas do not live on other chains so we couldn't do it at the time and so unfortunately for us we had to go build our own blockchain which i don't recommend to anybody it's just it's not easy it's very difficult it's not and but we had no choice and so at that time we had to do it so in doing so this thing mines cryptocurrency for um going through the motions of poc and proof of coverage and it also transfers data from little iot devices like this little tracker called kiko from south korea this thing transmits over 900 megahertz in the us it's unlicensed spectrum and it can transmit signals for like miles miles away and if this is in your house you could hear it from miles away and what you do is when you hear this data you transfer the data back to its owner or the server that is collecting the data and so that its owner knows where the item is and that could be like a backpack a purse a kid or a dog or whatever you can imagine or bike and those are the devices that would use this network and you would get rewarded for transferring that data so you're mining essentially in two ways one for proving coverage which is just sitting there and doing peer-to-peer blockchain communications proving yourself to the rest of the blockchain the rest of the community of hotspots and then the other piece would be just transmitting data as the data comes near you or you hear the data your hospital here's the data and you transmit that data back uh you're rewarded in hnt for that so that's the system we created and that's sort of the education for folks listening on how the healing of blockchain works and and why it's important to this ecosystem and so in 2019 when we started we launched when i talked to bill then we launched in austin texas and we had roughly like 100 like 100 helium hotspots in austin texas and we launched in austin texas not because we're based there our headquarters are in san francisco california but we launched in austin texas because there was a large community of a combination of iot enthusiasts or iot engineers and crypto enthusiasts blockchain engineers it's it's a it's always a nice balance of both and because we straddle the lines there on innovation in those both those marketplaces in both of those industries we thought maybe the people there would kind of understand what we're trying to do and luckily lucky for us we were pretty much right and that's all by luck by the way you know one of our product marketing folks did actually did the research to pick that place so it was very well thought out yeah multi coin is is in texas as well multi coin happens to be in austin texas as well yeah and so that was uh that's where we started impacting was 100 100 hot spots on the network and i got to check my notes now because things keep changing but now we're at you know 18 495 or something or you call it 18 500 hot spots not just in austin texas but thankfully around the world 3 000 cities covered and we're you know obviously in north america but also growing rapidly in europe and roughly two three weeks ago we actually started our first real launch in china we've had some fits and starts there um mostly because that market's very different and we really needed time to get a supply chain ramped up both manufacturing as well as uh distribution models for china to be able to serve those customers properly so two three weeks ago finally we got that put together with some partners in china to launch so now we're shipping hopefully this month i think or march we'll be shipping in in china many more units are on order for the united states uh canada as well as all the european countries and so that's uh you know quite quite quite quite a lot of growth i think for us i'm still early days of course so where are the most uh devices active right now is that continental us at this point yeah so the network has the most concentration in the united states and i would say like a good sort of gauge is in most of the nfl cities in the united states have very good coverage and i would say very good coverage would be like 90 of the cities covered with helium the people's network heliums you know blockchain network and usage and that's just the 30 top nfl cities and outside outside of that i would say there's another 100 with incredibly strong coverage in urban cities that's not considered nfl but they're also decently sized cities in the united states and in those cities are very well covered as well 80 80 plus coverage with high usage i should add in most of the urban cities now you can see for yourself what the usage looks like if you just go to uh mapper.helium.com yeah i think that you can see it on that on the app itself i believe so uh covert related questions so obviously the cities were a huge area where a lot of these devices were kind of uh put up so i know new york started off pretty heavy did you guys see any type of negative impact with covid obviously the tri-state area we saw an exodus from people leaving the city but um did you guys see anything that that would reflect on your end no kobe this is and continues to be an unfortunate you know problem for many people in the country including us individually as well as a company but fortunately one of the side effects i think of covet is that because everyone has to stay home and shelter in place for too long i think a lot of folks were able to find helium perhaps you know if if life was normal pre-code you know everyone's traveling people have jobs and you know different struggles and maybe wouldn't have the time to explore what helium is all about and that changed for us as a company and as a community i i don't know i i i don't know if i can attribute this directly to cobit but from kobe point on our community has grown massively we're probably well over 100 000 people now as part of the helium community just our technical community alone on discord i want to say is over 14 000 members now and they're very active on discord so if you're curious you don't have to be technical if you're just curious and you want to ask questions for yourself to better understand or do research on this you should definitely join our discord group discord dot gg slash helium and i'll give you all the links though you can like post those and um a great place for everyone to just chat and newbies are definitely welcome everyone's very friendly everyone is by and large very familiar with the technology from the ground up everything is open sourced and published so it's it's out there for peer review it's also out there for you know security review all of that so it's it's it's very it's in a very good place and we're growing rapidly and you know and that's all during covid like a lot of the expansion occurred during covet so i i do attribute that to potentially just people having time and taking the time you know i'm very thankful for that to learn about helium and seeing it as a as another option for them and potentially an option for them to you know help us grow the network so what i thought was super interesting was as you guys began to expand and as we saw more and more units join the network we saw kind of a second hand group of people that were tweaking the devices that they have right so they get larger antennae they get a bunch you know they're strapping into different parts of the house there's a community growing it's kind of this really neat organic movement uh you know i saw these people that were attaching them to trees and using electrical wires outside and going underground like that's so cool i mean you've got to feel pretty proud that there's people going to the length that they are to kind of build this network literally from the ground up so any comment there yeah yeah we definitely attracted i think a lot of what i would consider self-starters motivated motivated individuals who either have experience tinkering with hardware or tinkering with radio signals so imagine like the old uh ham radio guys um that are really into the physics of the signals helium lens it lends well it to that audience because uh because the hardware that we've used is all off the shelf part where anyone can buy it from many different sources they can build it themselves and the signal of unlicensed spectrum that we use which is for those that don't understand unlicensed spectrum 915 megahertz if you're my age when you were little your family all had these cordless panasonic phones and the way those cordless panasonic phones worked was that it the old ones use nine nine hundred megahertz for 915. and that that was a radio signal you can use to carry the voice chatter to connect your your cordless phone to the to the base and then you can get calls and stuff wirelessly right so we were kind of like that was our that's what i grew up with you're probably too young for that bill but maybe a lot of your listeners know what i'm talking about but that's the same technology we're using so it's been proven it's been around for like 60 years or whatever maybe a little less 50 years and so so it's it's common and what what that does is it allows anyone to really play with it and get get really into it and the fact that we supported something called laura wan which is a protocol for the connectivity that's open source from uh laura in a company called simtec that that also introduces helium into a massive ecosystem of iot engineers iot tinkering ioe iot professionals or hobbyists and so we really i think have done a decent job at least of breaking into that community and nurturing that community to to do all kinds of stuff from enhancing their ability to hear iot signals right and which would then in turn enhance some of their mining capabilities because just like this is physics it's not magical it's just physics which sometimes seems like black a black art you gotta you gotta like put the antenna of the helium hotspot as high as you can so that it it has as little obstruction as possible you know no no walls or roofs uh no trees if they can have that clear line of sight it can literally the seal the signal can go as far as the earth's arc so earth has a physical arc and so technically it has that range capability and so you see that you you see people really push the boundaries of physics and also allow their curiosity to you know enable them to create things and try things some things work some things don't work there's all kinds of things related to signal losses of like the length of cable the kind of cable the shielding and so and so i think that's gotten a ton of hobbyists involved which is great we love that and they're they're the folks powering the network yeah so you touched on a couple different things and i wanted to hit this real quick the the ham radio community there's radio licenses that are needed of course for some odd and strange reason in the us just so everybody's clear there's no extra licenses that are needed for this at all um this is using this very specific frequency and can you just expand quickly on that and then we can move on sure yeah the frequency in the united states is called uh us-915 915 and it's an unlicensed spectrum where the u.s government has say hey like this spectrum of waves anyone can use and there's guidelines so the fcc provides guidelines on how you use it how long you can occupy the channel how how much power you can apply to it uh to send a signal so those are all well-defined and our products fall within those guidelines and so it's plug and play really for most people unless you want to go and you know add an antenna and adding antenna is fine though there there's antenna boosting capability those are all within regulation of the fcc there there might be some things that are way like powered antennas maybe uh not okay with the fcc but you'll have to look that up or join discord and ask in our antennas channel because somebody will tell you there might even knowledge there yeah oh tons and am i there i'm sure there's people in the fcc in our in our groups playing around with this stuff as well so next question can you shine some light on the circulating supply and in the direct role of of the of the helium token itself and bring us up to speed kind of where we are currently and is there a set amount that's going to be mined similar to kind of like bitcoin how does this play out and is the community involved enough to change some of this outcome and do you see this kind of evolving into a community-run type uh yeah project yeah the you know i mentioned this earlier where i think everything is open source the other part of open sourcing is also governance of the open source project and having independent third parties really drive the future of of the network itself because it doesn't belong to helium it's owned by everyone and so how do you how do you organize inside in a way that the the you know intent and vision and purpose of the community is reflected and so we we did form an alliance we kicked off an alliance called decentralized wireless alliance or dui alliance and we probably kicked it off like six or eight months ago and the the alliance itself is independent it's an independent third party from helium and we're a member of it as well as anybody else that wants to be a member of it and the alliance drives a lot of the community consensus uh monthly community calls on zoom as well as having committee members request something called a hip a helium improvement process or helium improvement proposal and that hip drives a lot of the changes uh to the healing block chain um and or adds features to the healing block chain and so there's an entire you know foundation called dui now you can look it up dui.org that is the governance and guiding of all this now it's not perfect they're they're understaffed they just hired their first employee not that long ago a guy named scott so you can reach out to scott dy.org if you have some questions or ideas about dui but it's a it's definitely going the right direction and the goal is ultimately dui owns the open source uh intellectual property and they um manage and maintain the network and they're supposed to represent the members of the network which is everyone involved and so that's that's where the governance is going and it's a work in progress and so we're doing our best to push that along and like one one of the things i we hope to do is have like a helium or dui conference when we can all get together and be together in the same place i think that would be that would be fantastic to meet everybody yeah yeah and so that's like that's something that dui is probably going to organize and helium will definitely support and as far as like the circulation supply of tokens um something between when we last talked and now one of the hips proposed by the community was to cap the supply because helium's hnt mining was a limitless limitless supply and the community felt like it was very difficult for folks to understand how our supply work and how the system works a lot of it is because of the iot element a lot of folks in blockchain and crypto are very focused on the application itself uh or and it's very software oriented so when you start to get into the hardware piece of it you know helium is almost like below layer one in the sense we have both layer one as a protocol but we also have hardware uh which most other blockchain specific projects don't don't have that and so there was already a lot of complexity and then adding the fact that it was hard for people to understand the token economics we just decided the community decided let's just cap it 223 million cap it have havings like bitcoin and have it on that schedule so that folks understand and that and that seemed to have worked that helped a lot of the crypto audience understand the economics better and so that's that's why the change was made again it was again proposed by the community and so that occurred uh i don't know i don't even remember when it occurred a few months ago yeah four months ago something like that i think something like that yeah so so yeah i mean myself personally i definitely saw probably obviously this this time last year into the summer you know checking that checking the app you would see daily would be increasing and it it's appeared that it's gotten a lot harder to to mine those tokens so is that part of the process that was proposed and that's kind of one of the outcomes in reducing the inflation of the token itself into the uh community but it's it's becoming more difficult which i think was intended correct yeah i mean mining when you start i mean you're one of the first ones to start mining so you have to remember when you were mining you were probably in the pool of like 200 hotspots out there yeah i think i was the one i think i was the first one in uh connecticut i think so i mean yeah so yeah so bill you have to remember like if you were that early yeah the the mining rewards of five million per month were split between you and like 100 other people dude i mean under 100 other hot spots yeah yeah yeah you hit the jackpot right you're you're in early and you were just crushing it now right now the mining rewards are split across 18 000 plus hotspots so just just size alone and just doing the division there impacts your mining you know mining rewards uh no question about it but you know i think most people not i mean maybe not all but most people look at this as a very long term play like it doesn't take building a tel building a wireless decentralized telecommunications system that's global probably it's going to take longer than a year and a half bill i don't know i would say so yeah i think that's a fair assumption yeah yeah and you know if we're if we were talking to like at t or t-mobile today it probably would probably say take 20-30 years so if we can achieve this in the next two four years five years we probably we're crushing it in the record books there so switching topics a little bit um so you've you've got the token element talk to me about the relationship between some of the vcs that you talked about i know i don't know how much you can get into but i'm curious from union square ventures you mentioned google are are they involved from the equity standpoint are they involved in a token standpoint how does that play out what's the relationship between those and can you give any details in terms of the expected continued series for you guys in terms of raises and who's going to be involved sure so in series c it was very unique we we did a round of funding in series c that was both equity and token based and so to achieve that one of the things we did was we really wanted to align both union square as a multi-coin capital with the previous investors and so the way we opted to do that and to achieve that was we had to basically make everyone put everyone on the same page everyone has equity and so there's an equity component to it and the token component is something called a helium security token so that's that's not a utility that's absolutely a security and everyone has to get kyc and it's you're investing in it's an investment vehicle and hsts were basically created as part of our token economics so that the investors in the network as well as helium had a way to actually benefit from the growth of the network or because we're paying for it like we put money to create the network to get it started and so as a way to give everyone a skin in the game essentially all of our investors whether they're from seed angel to series c all have a form of hst helium security token and for those who don't know hst is essentially a built-in token that collects a percentage of the network mining rewards on a monthly basis and it started off at like 35 and it drops one percent per year and it flattens at 15 after 20 years or whatever it is so we're now at like i don't know 34 or 33 percent something like that and so it just keeps going down but it's just a way to keep our investors um aligned with the efforts as well as essentially to reward them for putting up fronting the money in the beginning and so that's how that's how that investment round went very complicated from a legal perspective yeah i don't think it's ever been done before and when you think about what's so complicated the complicated is actually taxes taxes is probably the most difficult part of that round treatment of security tokens and how does the irs look at that and those are all we're just so early so those were undefined what makes it hard isn't isn't the irs it's just undefined when things are undefined yep you don't know what to do so that that was the previous round looking ahead into future rounds you know we don't have any plans right now to to raise any more venture funds we don't know uh we have lots of friends we talk to a ton of folks in the adventure world both uh traditional venture as well as crypto so we're in touch all the time as well as most startups are but you know we're sort of just you know updating folks as they want to be updated and if uh if folks are interested they they come to us but we don't have any formal plans right now so you touched on one thing that i wanted to get to as well in terms of the device itself and then you earning the helium tokens i think the best probably way to to look at it is is similar to bitcoin mining ethereum mining or staking so like the irs from in terms of the irs this is this would be earned earned income i guess i guess you'd have to talk to your tax advisor but folks that are that are hesitant potentially within with getting involved like this is treated uh exactly the same as if you were one of the early miners or or even if you're mining some of the other uh cryptocurrencies out there or staking some of them out there it's it's it's very much similar in terms of being treated that way for taxes so yeah it's well defined you can google it now irs cryptocurrency you can look it all up yeah so yeah don't don't be afraid that i in that realm jump jump in get involved what is the um what is the wait list look like right now in terms of manufacturing is there a backup when can people expect to to get a new fresh round of helium devices out and then finally is there an upgrade coming is there a bigger device uh is there a way to combine devices where do you see this going or are we limited kind of to the to the device that we have i can't grab it but the device that's right next to me now pointing out the window what can we exist exactly exactly yep yeah um so yeah so okay on on let me just talk a little bit about the supply and who's making them so today well maybe some of your newer audiences uh viewers aren't gonna know about this but helium doesn't build the hotspot anymore so i showed you the earlier will be called the og hot spot we don't make them anymore and part of part of the reason why we don't is because again we open sourced everything and the purpose of us creating this effort in an open source way is to reduce barrier of adoption and that includes reducing barrier for others to build uh and to create and to you know monetize on their on their work to build hardware and so we have and we started with a company called rack wireless it's a it's a lorawan gateway and sensor manufacturer out of shenzhen china they were our contract manufacturer for the original hot spot and so we it was just easy for us to approach them and say hey we don't we don't want to build this anymore but the ip is free it's open source would you do it would you build this yourself if we gave you all the rights and enabled you to do it and they said sure happy to do so and so they were the first third-party independent manufacturer of this new helium you know i think they call it an h t miner or h t mining gateway or something like that or mining hotspot i think it's called the h the rack wireless h t mining hotspot maybe sorry lots of names so they were the first and they hit the market good news bad news they could make they made like i don't know 12 000 or 13 000 units or something like that sold out in like four hours uh unfortunately which is great lots of demand it's also bad in that rack as well as helium we just did a really poor job of forecasting and the effects of you know my fault the effects of not forecasting well in hardware is is that it has like implication of weeks like weeks of delay because we didn't forecast for the demand which was probably in a 36 to 40 000 unit realm not 12. wow we are short by a lot and i think under normal circumstances being short on that kind of forecast means that you're waiting another eight weeks for the factory to like get the parts spin up the tools to like build a thing in an efficient way and then shipping it out to you right well you you take that you know eight week lead time and then you add covid problems so factories can't run 24 7 with the full staff right they reduced everything by like 66 percent so that everyone can remain safe and they should do that no question but that slows your your ability to build so you're eight weeks now you get to add on more more delays and then we learned we learned something about hardware supply chain which is very difficult is that everything coming from china goes through inspection at customs in the united states in that inspection process at customs one time depending on what it is and during covid it took even longer not that they didn't want to let the thing in it's just that they have protocols they have to do their inspections and they they can't do them as fast as they did before they just aren't allowed to have as many customs officers on staff at the same time so again that adds delays and so unfortunately that's created a massive wait list and delay that's a lot longer than we wanted instead of two three months delay it's probably now six five six month delay i know a lot of people are upset and unhappy with that i just wanna like remind you making hardware and selling hardware and shipping it is incredibly hard it's like it's not even the same category as software you know you can download you make a mistake you can just patch it download it again super easy but when you talk about hardware it is a whole different ball game and it's very difficult so granted you know five to six months is unacceptable it's so frustrating i'm more frustrating anybody else part of it's my fault for not forecasting correctly but we had no idea we just did not know i suppose it's a good problem right it's a good problem to have but you know is there any thought out there in terms of you we know that the the system itself is decentralized is there a way that hey let's let's offer the patent out to the community and say guys build this thing yourself let this thing rip and let the community find it right yeah and we are we have done that um so you we are adding three more vendors to the mix bobcat is going to ship in china um in march bobcats a manufacturer out of china they're the largest laura manufacturer actually in the world so they they have great capacity i'm very confident in bobcat uh so it's called the bobcat hnt miner nebra is another company and manufacturer out of the uk in nebra they've uh they've got a few thousand units coming as well and i believe they're shipping in march as well march or april something along those lines so that's two and then the third is a company called syncro bid and their uh early startup in on the east coast somewhere and i i suspect they'll you know we we just finished testing their product and it works so i suspect they'll start to ramp up and they should be able to you know ship units in the you know hopefully in summer time i i don't know exactly when but hopefully it's summertime so that that to me tells me that you've got three additional vendors with good capacity we know the forecast out there right now is about 150 000 units for this year so wow yeah so yeah so we're no longer in the league of thirty thousand we're in the league of 100 000 and the forecast is is there so now we're forecasted correctly that's awesome that what yeah wow i mean just just thinking back to 2019 how this thing is grown this is this is true uh you know orders of magnitude so kudos to you guys it's incredible to see this play out it's very very cool one question that i do get is pretty simple to answer but talk to us about privacy on the network right so anybody who has the app um you're seeing where these devices are located physically is there any concern on your end from a company's standpoint um from a user's standpoint for privacy and how can you comment on that yeah it's probably our least favorite part of the system because proof of coverage means that your hotspot needs to prove itself to be useful like it's providing coverage and it's in a place that's well suited to provide coverage then you you technically need to know where that coverage is that's sort of the whole point and the unfortunate side effect of that is that there is exposure to hey where your hot spots located on this block or in this three block radius in this town on this street or around these streets we we can't um we can't obfuscate that completely what we've done is try to make it less precise so that it's not exactly within you know within feet of the hot spot of location but so it's like within the three block radius kind of deal but still that's you know you're you're still within a three four block radius which isn't great and so that's our least favorite part from a security from a physical security perspective the other aspects of security is is a lot better and i think incredibly well done so when it comes to like encryption the data is handled via encryption physical encryption keys that's on the both the sensor device as well as the hotspots themselves so they all have this hardware based ecc chip on there that secures the keys so that that does wonders from a cyber security perspective and data protection perspective the data is fully encrypted and always encrypted until the owner receives it in their data store um that's really important the other is the hospital security itself the hotspots fairly simple it needs access to the internet it only has one outbound port one inbound port it's well defined so you can you can isolate that on a dmz or firewall if you like and that's very low risk it's not not impenetrable nothing is in it on the internet just so you know so it but it's low risk relative to all the other things connect to your home network like your printers and your sonos device and your your your ring doorbells all of those things have are connected through your home network and you guys all have those things so helium is not worse than that slightly better but not perfect so final final notes here in terms of where you see this in 2022 2023 from a forecasting standpoint you're talking about another 150 000 units china is getting uploaded right now we think that that's going to grow pretty pretty well europe is expanding where do you see the token going in terms of not necessarily price standpoint but use right like right now do you see this kind of morphing into something else um do you see uh company larger companies trying to adopt this and leveraging a smaller network like this how do you see this play out yeah i mean i think there's two key two key crossroads or two key milestones i should say not crossroads but two key milestones coming up one is structurally the architecture of the network is evolving so we're moving to a validator staking model that's one that we announced about a week ago the the test that's coming up live on thursday this week that has received just unexpected demand and what what that means is our full node of the blockchain is no longer going to be on each individual hotspot as i showed you earlier the network that's gotten so big that that's becoming very inefficient and so for the sake of performance and efficiency we have to move to a validator model that can live on aws or google cloud platform or azure or whatever any data center or you can host it yourself and that that'll enable validators to stake themselves to be trustworthy and to hold a copy of the blockchain and to communicate with all the edge hotspots to make sure everyone's up to date so that's that's a shift in our model and we didn't know again how many people want to do this but we've got over 2 000 folks signed up for it wow another two yeah other two thousand over two thousand that roughly eight years you know their own servers and validators that's very exciting and so that allows our network to scale really indefinitely which which is what we need to be a global network so that's huge and the validators by the way are spread across 73 countries which is also fantastic because you want centralized very decentralized you want you want diversity the other milestones are really related to usage right the usage of the network who who's using it how quickly can they ramp and as i mentioned earlier a lot of this is hardware related which takes a lot longer than just pure software yeah but having said that you know we've got new customers like airlie which is an air quality sensor company that signed on recently with us and they're deploying air quality sensors across different cities both in europe and in the united states for california i think it's fantastic it's wonderful we have seasonal wildfires that burn 80 percent of the state every every summer love to know that i can go outside and breathe so huge huge helpful product and service that they're providing lone star asset tracking is another asset tracking company that tracks trucks and cars and heavy equipment they're using a network in various cities now still full is a maritime tracking for boats and yachts at different ports in different marinas uh in the in the in the united states and so we've got a bunch of you know applications such as that as well as like car parking tracking in like huntington beach california a company called noble systems has a smart parking solution that they sell to cities for letting you know if a parking space is available or not letting the city know so there's a bunch of applications coming on board now we onboarded probably 60 new i would say 60 new customers last year and in january alone we signed on 10 more just in one month so it's looking promising right that the pace is growing where we've scaled up our business development team quite a bit and so that's all growing rapidly so we're pretty happy about that um but those are like really i think the important metrics for folks looking into this is you know how is the network growing does it have potential to scale massively the answer is yes do we need to make some structural changes yes we do and it's happening are people adopting this and the answer is yes and the more the more you have network coverage the more i think customers and users will use it it's like airbnb right the more you have homes up for airbnb the more people will use it instead of going to hotel absolutely um it just has to be there so we're starting to see that effect and then the last thing i'll i'll uh mention from just from a technology roadmap perspective before we sign off is you know our our mission and goal was always to create us this iot network that's ubiquitous and very low cost easy to use what we've learned over the last three years three and a half years is that the feature that we created called the blockchain is actually useful and usable on any wireless infrastructure doesn't have to be iot it doesn't have to be lower wan it can run on wi-fi it can run on lte 5g so you can imagine if someone did want to take the blockchain and build wi-fi networks or 5g networks at a lightning pace leveraging consumers definitely possible awesome awesome stuff well it's been amazing to watch you guys grow i'm super proud to be somewhat part of the community and and be involved um throughout the years so awesome job man like i want to talk touch base over the next few months and then we'll touch base in a couple years too and see all the progress you guys have made but great catching up with you and i appreciate you giving me the time and uh look forward to seeing the helium network grow and continue to scale so kudos to you guys awesome job thank you i appreciate the time [Music] i hope you enjoyed the interview i hope you enjoyed the quality content that we're providing for you guys please subscribe to our channel down below and always check out some of the new videos that we have available if there's somebody you want to see as an interviewee on our channel let us know we'll reach out thank you guys i appreciate the support and as always subscribe

Channel: Bull Flag Group

Views: 15,994

Rating: 4.958869 out of 5

Keywords: bitcoin, podcast, bill guida, knowledge, learn, interview, expert, crypto, Helium, helium token metrics, helium token news, helium token coinbase, helium token hotspot, helium tokenomics, helium hotspot, helium blockchain, helium hnt, helium cryptocurrency, helium hotspot review, bull flag group

Id: 0h4DXa7Fz_U

Length: 44min 11sec (2651 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021