Exclusive AMA with Frank Mong, COO of Helium Network | #ThePeoplesNetwork

hello hi there hi hi mr monk how are you hey how are you uh and this is let me just turn my camera on hey how's it going hi let's go can you see me now yeah i can see you thanks for having me i appreciate it yes welcome as smarties grow what role do you see helium playing in the future yeah you know i think smart cities will grow in different ways um depending on where you are in the world i do think the one common problem the smart cities are all trying to solve is how do you connect small sensors small devices to the internet that is one low cost of course not just low cost of the sensor but low cost of connecting but also you know low cost and battery life something that's super battery efficient and so what helium has done over the eight years that we've been really trying to solve this problem not just for smart cities but for anyone any anyone in any device trying to connect to the internet especially iot internet of things it's to find that combination of being able to connect in a low-cost manner um [Music] on the economics of connecting to the internet for sensors also battery life and that's why helium decided to go with laura wan as a connectivity protocol to start as we looked at creating a decentralized network a decentralized approach to building wireless networks and so i think i think helium has really pioneered this idea that you know building a connectivity wireless network for any city smart cities smart villages smart towns can be done by the people and so i think our role in the future hopefully evolves but certainly in the short term is to provide iot connectivity for any smart environment hopefully you know healing can play that role okay yeah next question is what industry outside iot and wireless communication would helium potentially expand into yeah there's there's a lot of opportunity uh as it relates to not just for helium but our ecosystem my good josh you found us and you found the helium community right it's pretty cool um i know you're on twitter you should definitely check out discord i don't know if you join our discord community yeah yeah yeah but you should actually yeah definitely so you showed that it's a discord dot gg slash helium and the there's so much opportunity out there for not necessarily healing them but for the community to build applications and leverage this network that we built together and i think i think what's pretty cool about this is uh today it's iot and it's it's wonderful that we're doing this because there's so many kinds of use cases and sensors that need this technology so this was easy to easy problem to pick to try to fix and solve but what's incredible is out of this journey that helium has been on it's not necessarily the network itself that we've done anything unique about it's the fact that we've enabled consumers like you your your neighbors your relatives your family your your fans around the world good josh they build a network right they can build it and they're incented to build a network and i think that's the key it's incentives it's a lining doesn't send so what we figured out is we've created an incentive model with the healing blockchain that tightly aligns with the creation of wireless networks not just for iot but imagine for other things right like like lte 5g and in wi-fi so it's pretty powerful and we think that helium with this healing blockchain the healing community really owns the blockchain now it's an open source project the community can really take that to the next step and we're starting to see that with new partners and new partnerships new ecosystem players proposing improvement proposals that enable helium's blockchain to support lte 5g and wi-fi six and so forth so that's pretty cool that's something i think that's something that you'll definitely see us expand into in the near future that will be great here how will helium compete if the big isps decide to build iot networks yeah you know that's that's a common question we get a lot is how do how do we see ourselves in relation to internet service providers telcos and they by the way they have built iot networks a good example of a company is a is an international telco called orange telecom they're based in france they've built a massive iot network a lower land network both in france and in other parts of the world and what's really interesting is we've worked a lot with them in the united states they don't have a network here but they have other services related to internet data for private networks and so forth and what i think we found to be interesting is that there's actually a symbiotic relationship with helium antibes for telcos because you can never have enough coverage is as a result right and so i think isps see helium not necessarily as a competitor but more as a roaming partner where if the isp has committed to using you know laura wan as as orange telecom has they they can um's coverage as a roaming partner for areas that they don't have coverage and for areas they do have a coverage no problem right you use the orange uh orange you know network uh oranges norway network but but if they're soft spots is what they call it in the industry and their coverage and then certainly the united states they have soft spots but in other parts of the world they they have soft spots as well there's no reason why they couldn't use helium and use us as a roaming partner okay yeah will there be network peering support with the things that work yeah well so yeah will there be network peering support with the things network and this is related to roaming you know i think specifically with the things network we we would be happy to work with them again in a similar manner in which we can work with you know isps uh as the things network has built a large lower network around the world helium is uh well on its way to doing the same thing um we do think you know there's some overlap but but there are certainly places where we are definitely not overlapped and i think again the helium network the people's network and the things network are very complementary i think there's plenty of ways in which we can share the network with each other we're open source open for anybody including the things network and really up and down the stack i don't think we compete at all and we don't have any desire to compete so um our goal is to be inclusive for anyone that wants to work with us and roam with us so definitely i mean if you're friends with the things that or let them know what are the best performing and most innovative user cases you have ever seen so far yeah so the interesting thing about iot and laura wan is there's tons of different use cases um you can go to helium.comuse and take a look at some examples but i would have to say the biggest use cases by far are in the area of water management and so this could be water leak detection to water metering for water utilities as well as clean water sensors to make sure the water's safe for drinking so anything around water is a huge use case a really popular use case i would say and it's a big concern for a lot of people and a lot of communities around the world the second use case probably just as big is really around asset tracking a supply chain and so that's things like you know tracking medication that's made in a laboratory to manufacturing and processing and then shipped to clinics and then delivered to patients that entire supply chain is really critical it's critical to saving lives so tracking those and making sure that the medication is stored properly it's transported you know correctly so that it can maintain its integrity and it stays fresh um stored in the correct manner you know so that's so that when you use it as a patient it's at its best those are all things i think that the helium network is fantastic for okay yeah another is not so serious but more around fun like scooters scooter tracking and scooter sharing or bike sharing and tracking those assets around the city around the town under villages that's also very popular as well what are your future plans for helium yeah i mean there's quite a few uh we have a lot of work to do i i think the network is has grown very rapidly we're very happy with that you know we launched in august of 2019 that was our first hotspot that joined a network in austin texas and from that point on to today we've grown to about over 25 000 hot spots that's online we're in i don't know 66 countries around the world about 3 000 plus cities we're trying to expand as quickly as we can into more and more cities and more and more countries um so we have a lot of work to do there it's it's uh it's a lot of hard work from our third-party manufacturers all of our ecosystem partners because helium doesn't make hot spots anymore we open sourced everything so there are a lot of manufacturers creating and making a compatible hnt miner and man they can't make them fast enough we've got i think 150 000 units back ordered across all the vendors um there are more vendors that are going to start building we've got about five more coming online soon starting to build hopefully mid mid-year towards the end of the year um that that's going to help alleviate a lot of the demand pressure um but there's so just i'm that's near term future you know long-term community now on discord as i mentioned is a very tech 125 000 users now on discord very active most of them are highly engaged and that's that's fantastic to see and we have a foundation called dui decentralized wireless alliance and the dui alliance is really the governance and custodian of the helium technology and so for us you know near future to mid future our goal is to to really empower dui and the community that is on discord to really drive the future of helium you know we're we're the creators but we're certainly not you know the the main character of this open source project budget like it's it's definitely people it's the focus on 45 000 folks on on discord 50 000 folks in our in our community overall and it's diy why uh so you know our hope is empower them more enable it more um and that's that's part of a midterm you know midterm to future plans and the final thing is just releasing more technology things like validators improving the scaling of the network right we're going to move away from all the hotspots being full nodes it's just doesn't scale well it's it's too much congestion on the network scaling that down to you know a couple thousand validators on a network around the world which would be great where they store and they process the blockchain and they're doing the you know through coverage uh in consensus groups uh that's that's super important um we're very quickly going to have about 175 hot spots on the network you know by the end of the year uh and by the then you gotta have validators you gotta change your architecture to network it's gonna be more efficient we're really hard the community is helping us with our our current uh validator side that's looking good um and we may you know we're constantly trying to make improvements on on the blockchain itself and the community's doing a great job with our hit process so so much man um so much going on i've got tons of customers joining us we're announcing new com we have a dedicated business development team now we have about four folks on the team that's growing to about 12 for the summer we've got about 80 interns coming in for summer internship here on the biz dev team and that's all they're focused on is getting usage getting users on the network so everything from small commerce to large companies and water management to asset tracking and certainly trying to do deals to get those are all just everything we've got to do it's a ton of work yes okay great thanks for answering all those questions

Channel: Gajesh S Naik

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Keywords: frank mong, helium network, helium, hnt token, helium network token, the peoples network, the people network, helium future plans, helium network interview, helium network future plans, hnt to the moon, what is hnt token, mine hnt, stake hnt, helium network techonology, helium network use case, helium network news, helium news, hnt news, hnt token news

Id: pKHX7Cc92hQ

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021