Helium’s Frank Mong: Scaling to 1M Nodes, Capping HNT Supply and 5G/WiFi Plans

all right hey everyone welcome back to the delphi podcast i'm tom shaunice from the hosts of the chain reaction segment today i have on frank monk who's the ceo of helium network frank how's it going hey tom how are you thanks for having me yeah of course man we had a mirror on we did a note on you guys i run a couple of nodes so i'm up to amp to have you guys on thank you so frank what is helio network for those who don't know i don't know how you wouldn't at this point but for those who don't yeah helium is a company that is on a mission to build a network uh globally that allows iot sensors small little devices to connect an internet openly and as low cost as possible so that's the mission we're on and to achieve this goal we've essentially created uh both parts as well as a platform that's decentralized and so the crux of what we do now is we've created something called the helium blockchain which you can think of as an incentive mechanism to encourage everyone individuals and neighbors and consumers alike to go out and help us build a network and so the helium hotspot which is the picture right there behind me or it's uh this thing is sort of where helium started um we're a seven-year-old company and this helium hotspot is both a full node on the blockchain as well as it provides range lower land connectivity for sensors that's awesome i actually just got one of the tabs in the mail so i could track things with it yeah and i have uh have a bunch of nodes at home and at the office as well so frank how exactly has that incentive structure worked right because when i first found you guys like a year ago there was a thousand or two thousand nodes on the network now there's twelve thousand how are you incentivizing people to go out and buy nodes and actually run the network yeah you know the the objective is to have global coverage and so we need uh both we need lots of uh hotspots everywhere and we do want density uh certainly in urban areas so that applications and devices like the little tabs you have uh has great connectivity anywhere it goes both indoors and outdoors right and the goal here is to achieve something that wi-fi and bluetooth have a hard time with which is outdoors if you go outside of your home your office and you want to track your your dog or your purse or your car it's the only option you have really is cellular that's viable but cellular comes at a cost both on data plan as well as battery life and so using lorawan and this helium network that's out there solves both of those problems both power we're talking years of battery life and cost wise you know for that little tab thing if you wanted to track that every five minutes for a year it's like a buck a buck a year which is nothing and so you know to achieve this we we have to have density in urban areas and we have to have you know coverage everywhere in rural areas as well and so that the incentive structure for any individual to participate whether it's from the beginning when we only had you know 0 to 100 units in austin texas or now 12 000 and beyond you really have to think about a couple things here uh two i would say one cost cost of the of the hot spot themselves i showed you the hot spot earlier that was our early original healing hotspot cost to the end user early on was 495 dollars to buy that plus tax it's expensive it's you know and it's a it's a risk right who knows what this is who knows if it works um and so there's a leap of faith and so for taking that leap of faith you're paying more money for that but you're early and you mind more as a result of that because you're mining for longer um now you can buy a different version of this we've open sourced everything so you have third parties like rack wireless building their version of a what they call the rack hotspot miner and that device costs 249. so it's half the price of what we were charging but at the same time there's more people mining so but the cost of entry is lower for one uh and mining is certainly uh pressured because there's less mining per per individual hotspot however it's costing you less uh the other thing is early days uh you know tom when you started certainly what was the value of helium h t who knows right it was all over the counter there was really no market price that was set and today you know thankfully the market demand has driven lots of listings and helium agents you know you can find it on finance us if you're based in the us if you're international finance dot com you can go there and there's a number of others in china like who and bilaxi and i think there's more and more now uh ftx you can go on and you can trade and that so there's a value for the token today which there wasn't before so the risk is lower the cost of entry is lower but you're mining less but i think you know for those that are spreadsheet oriented all the variables are in place you can do your own math and you can figure out if this is something you want to participate or not participate yeah no that that's a that's a great overview i'm actually so i'm not annoyed but i missed the days when i would mine so much hnt when no one was on the network but i mean granted the price was uh not there at all so it really it's all you know looking back but i guess the interesting thing here is though i mean you not only lowered the cost of the hot spots but you open sourced it so now you have other providers providing them way cheaper but the other thing i noticed is there's a couple of new companies out there that are basically white labeling helium and just giving consumers you know 100 cash to run a node the economics for those who know is is great to that companies but for the end user they don't know and on the flip side it helps you guys build out your coverage globally i thought that was pretty interesting yeah you know our our community is uh absolutely amazing uh you know the developers the technical community on discord uh there there's a whole cast of characters there i think we're over 5000 members now um and yeah this is amazing right because we this whole thing really started august 1st of 2019 so here we are in november 2020 5 000 plus strong just on the technical side and the folks there are not only technical iot oriented uh blockchain crypto oriented but they're entrepreneurs and you know i gotta i gotta give them shouts out they're they're doing a great job guys like uh meshaphy and and emirate they were there really early probably the same time you you joined tom they jumped in and they've come up with a mix of models and they've evolved over time and what i'm talking about is they would buy you know more than one hot spot they would buy whatever you know tens or hundreds of hot spots and they would i'm jealous of those patrons i mean but it was risky i mean they bought these things 500 bucks a piece it's not cheap very early on yeah no you're right it was a risk yeah it was a huge risk they took the risk they bought the hot spots and then they just went on like social media and offered hot spots for free to people that were willing to put the hot spots in their home and i like that idea and i still do because i think we we as a company we couldn't get the price down believe me we would love for the hot spot to be free the goal is to build a network the goal isn't to make money on selling hot spots just so so we're clear with everyone helium helium's not making money selling hotspots uh we had to build a hotspot to start because no one believed us we talked to the lorawan community we wanted manufacturers within the lorawan community to just build this and use our blockchain but no one would i mean why would they we we were either they're crazy or we were lying right one or the two thankfully we're not lying we're but we are crazy uh the goal is our game it's right but frank i mean you guys you guys covered the us and you're now covering the globe with coverage and you're not out there hopping on wireless towers for american tower crown castle or buildings right you're and you're not you know you're not spending billions of dollars you're not rolling truck out you don't have to hire a thousand people like does does the wireless community understand how impressive that is i don't know that's a good question um i i don't know i we we uh we're you know we've certainly through our history you know we've talked to guys like at t and verizon uh comcast certainly they're venture arms we are venture-backed company we're a startup so we have talked to those folks um you know and like i don't blame them necessarily it's a it's an extremely novel idea and the approach is unproven and the the closest analogy i can think of is sort of like airbnb and uber and i know uh both airbnb and uber founders when they first started they they were faced with lots of resistance right you know i i have a taxi cab why would i ride in your car tom i don't know who you are but i for some reason trust yellow cab i mean i think those days are over i don't think there's yellow cabs anymore or they're all on the platform the drivers are all uber drivers or lyft drivers and the same with airbnb you know uh imagine convincing someone to come to someone's house and pay pay 60 bucks to sleep on the couch or an air mattress crazy before that yeah who won who would actually open their home for a stranger and two uh who would actually go rent that right but but now it's i think it's commonplace right i don't know if hotels now it's really aren't needed yeah you know i know people my age would rather just do an airbnb than a hotel it's just a different generational thing and and the thing is it's not i i know you're a young young young dude you know it's not just your age right it's not just the millennials you're right and jen's ears you know i'm gen x and i i use airbnb i prefer it oh hell yeah it's so much easier yeah it's so much easier but again when it first started it took the guys at airbnb the team there probably seven eight years to really pick up steam right because they had to deal with both supply and demand they had to create a supply of apartments for people to rent and they had to generate demand to go convince you to change your habit don't do what your parents did and rent a hotel try airbnb right and that just takes time it's human behavior it's its habits and helium really is taking that model which is already complicated it's already novel right but we're trying to take advantage of this sort of supply and demand two-sided marketplace model and apply it to the telco crown castle american tower world the the difference here is we added another layer of complexity there's this thing called cryptocurrency in blockchain that's that's the underpinning of that and so you know for us helium has education process that's a little bit more complicated than airbnb and uber because now you have to understand the crypto aspect of the blockchain aspect which is the main incentive driver i think and that's what's i think super unique but also i think from uh looking at it from the crypto lens even though we're not like crypto native people not that anyone really is a crypto native person we are certainly like the furthest from that but i think what we have done is found a very practical application of crypto and blockchain and applied it to an industry in this telco world that hasn't changed for what i don't know a couple hundred years that has been zero change it's a complete monopoly there's a very few group of people that own that and they're they're wealthy as hell and the rest of us pay them you know my my bill for this phone right it just keeps going up every year to use that data right and so why not like why not figure out how to democratize that why not figure out how to disrupt that industry so that you know tom your friends and family your neighborhood your childhood friends your community they can benefit from it why can't we all become american tower why couldn't we all be a host a cell tower ultimately the hard part is as much as i get that and i love it like let's all you know let's be our own cell tower people don't understand that all they get is you know how do i connect how do i track my dog but you know you could you could say that too i mean the other question for you here though is like do the use of the network care about the crypto aspect because in my mind you guys use really cool crypto incentives to get people to buy nodes to provide coverage but on the flip side you know are the people tracking their dog tracking their lime scooter tracking their iot in a factory do they care about any of that yeah uh this depends i i would say most the good news is most of the large enterprises that we talk to um they they understand that there's a crypto element um they're they're curious they're not i've seen a a real shift in sentiment i would say in 2018 um at the height of like just a lot of the fraud within crypto a lot of the the the sort of hype that is all hype and and not real that that's negative the negative sentiment that was created and you know a lot of a lot of people point to icos and all that that that sort of has faded from my perspective you know when we go talk to uh large corporations whether it doesn't matter what industry they they they understand that there's a crypto blockchain element to what we do but they're more curious about it less sort of oh you're if you're got crypto blockchain and you must be a fraudster we're not getting that in 2017 in 2018 in particular uh there was a bit of that there was a bit of oh you know i don't want to blockchain and you know crypto are you did you ico you know if you did i don't want to talk to you like a lot of weird questions yeah yeah you must be a scammer uh that's not that's not there anymore which is good um what i think the curiosity i think stems from wow you actually have i've heard a lot about bitcoin and ethereum and all that i really haven't seen a use case in this world of blockchain crypto this seems like a really good use case like what you've done seems like a useful thing uh and i can certainly use that as a large enterprise i'm curious about it how do i how do i engage if i don't have to touch the crypto piece great because i don't know how to like as an entity if uh if mike if i'm like nestle who we work with or lime scooter i don't know how to touch i don't know how to i can't hold the crypto in my in my spreadsheets as a corporation in the united states of america i don't know how to hold it like what is the government what do i call it it's not us dollar right what is it right so they don't it's too hard meaning that there's too much bureaucracy paperwork and tax implement there's so many implications that they don't want to go open it's a can of worms that they don't want to deal with it so hence this data credit to token system that helium created the burn and meant equilibrium now we're getting into the crypto bit this this is important because the only reason we did that was so large corporations could think of the helium network as a network as a service no different than aws or google cloud platform or xbox live like everyone's used to buying credits for things like you want to play games on xbox live you got to subscribe you know there's another underlining current power is powering your ability to play fortnite on there or if you want to you know you want to use aws resources and get cpu and and storage and and all that that that's that's aws credits you got to go pay for credits there's a there's a system in there that's the transaction system helium is the same thing ours is called helium data credits and it's basically pay per packet right you pay per packet to use the network and when you talk of talk to them in that way they get it like oh yeah well how much is it they can think of dollars oh yeah sure but it's it's i get it i'll i'll buy i'll buy data credits all day it's like it's a subscription model i could i could i can account for that it's almost like logistically they have the ability to account for so then therefore they're willing to to actually take a look at it and try it and so that's sort of they can't understate that i mean that's that's important i mean they need to be able to think about they need to be able to account for it i mean one of the super interesting things that i loved about your token econ um is that it's inverse so as the price of your native token heal even goes up it's convertible into more data credits because data credits is paying at a certain dollar value and the flip side is also pretty interesting because if helium goes down i mean you could just you could still buy a ton of data credits and then that would obviously potentially bet the price of htf yada yada but the dual aspect of it is cool because it it reduces the velocity and the thought process on the business side and also allows you guys to increase some value right so so right exactly so to answer your question the concept of helium and using a people-powered network is very intriguing for a lot of enterprises uh the idea of subscribing or buying or accumulating data credits to use the network is is no is no longer novel or foreign to them they've been trained by google cloud and you know amazon aws microsoft azure to do that right every everything is subscription based now so they're used to that cloud service or network as a service idea so that's not a barrier and so we were trying to find ways to just remove barriers of adoption the the probably the number one concern for most of the enterprises that we work with is network availability and overall sllas um and the the ability to ensure them that hey there's an sla on the network yeah and all that is is risk mitigation right and so that's where either our ecosystem partners which i prefer or helium we need to come up with a sla service and all that is if you and i we we have slas on like if we have youtube tv or we have netflix there's some sla if netflix goes down and we can't watch our favorite shows for a week i'm sure there's some kind of you know thing we get back like five bucks or whatever right same with our internet provider right um and so that's all they're looking for and it's most enterprises have this mentality it's kind of like a check box you know regulation or compliance or governance or whatever and you and someone just needs to say yeah okay i'll be accountable like if if for some reason the healing network isn't available here's your recourse right this is what you get and so that's something that i think i'd like the ecosystem to to do i would like the people's network to come up with that kind of solution um helium certainly can we're looking at it as well one of our investors is munich re the largest reinsurer in the world that's their businesses slas and insurance policies so you know we have a path it's wild to think of an insurance uh company as to focus on slas you're totally right but just think out loud i mean it sounds like you could potentially automate that like if service goes down they get some credit back something like that it sounds like it's definitely doable yeah it is easy it's just you know again helium and you mentioned this earlier we're a small team we're really lean and we have a lot to do and so hence hence why i feel like open source is so important to us we have got bigger problems to solve right now as you as you're fully aware um just just to go to that that coverage idea like and the products like i love the helium tabs and i think there's a great like proof of concept on using the network but i think it's hard for people to contextualize like using iot themselves like i think that they get it when it's embedded in a product like if i buy a dog collar off amazon it automatically has helium in it not that i have to go to healing and say buy this right do you think that people are going to interact this interact with helium more on like the products you and the community roll out or it just being naturally embedded into products going forward no i agree with you i think you're you're right in that um the more you can inject the helium tech into everyday things that's part of your you know your behavior or part of your your routine right that's the easiest way to go um at least in the consumer realm when you start thinking consumer and this is where like you know we're working with tile uh on uh lorawan compatible tile um you know that everyone has a tile like though those are the things that i think make a difference in our ecosystem and certainly in the lower land ecosystem um but i think it's early days still i really do think it when it when it comes to consumers um the idea of like they don't it doesn't matter what lorawan is right it's it's about outcomes what am i getting what's the outcome i'm going to get the outcome is if you had a lorawan compatible dog caller that's running on helium network you you wouldn't lose your dog you would know where your dog is at all times just go buy that collar and by the way you wouldn't have to charge it every day or every other day because the battery life on that thing would be six months to a year yeah mind blown oh by the way you don't have to you don't have to pay att 10 bucks a month to to collect the data is that the alternative is that like the alternative for people i don't think they understand how expensive the alternatives are here most i honestly like dog lovers that have those the cell callers they know and they're painful and it's it's annoying and it doesn't work well it's it's all these things right but i think it's early and it's like any kind of tech adoption cycle we're still in like the early adopter phase of this world that we're in very very early adopter and like i would argue helium is trying to pioneer the injection of both blockchain and iot connectivity into a mainstream adoption cycle we're trying to push it there using the idea of incentive to encourage a change in behavior that's what we're doing same thing that uber did same thing that airbnb did right in the early days dude no no one wanted to stay in a stranger's home today we all do right yeah weird no it it so frank i mean you guys have gone further than i thought you would have by now to be honest like i didn't think you'd have this many nose network but i guess the thing that i'm i'm worried not worried about but the thing i think about is how do you go from 12 000 nodes to 120 000 nodes right you really need that that dev interest that uptake how do you think you guys get there is it just education keep crushing or what are the steps together yeah it's grinding there's no secret sauce there's no magic uh it's a grind it's hard i i can tell you so the way i look at the audience here is we split into three ways we have the network builders uh that's the people's network the people that want to either buy a compatible gateway and light it up with uh with the mining capabilities uh di wires right are in that bucket as well and then there's the bucket of users people that can use the network and find it could find good use out of it and then there's a bucket of of what i call the crypto enthusiasts you know they're they're in it for the crypto right they love hnt we i think i think they call themselves h t army now and so we've got the people's network building it we got users using it and then we got this hnt army that loves the the h t crypto piece of this all three are crucial to this ecosystem all three all three have to be healthy and thriving right and so today i think helium has to take on a lot of the work of the custodian and the facilitator to facilitate and make sure that all three parts of this system are are well oiled and are are thriving and growing rapidly and so i'll i'll break down your question into three parts and address each because i think each is very different when it comes to network build out it's absolutely adoption by third parties right we see with rack wireless as an example i mean helium over a year we we sold 12 000 units because it was expensive it was like 500 bucks 425 at best right it was always expensive and we couldn't and we lost a ton of money doing that that's why we don't want to build anymore if we made a ton of money building it we would have we would continue to be in that business right say the hardware best dude yeah of course if we were actually profitable guys we'd still be selling hotspots why not right exactly yeah it's not profitable we had to do it we had to do it because no one believed us but i think people believe us now so there's a there's a there's a pipeline of hardware makers now waiting for uh their turn to start building the helium hotspot we got to solve a couple of issues on the blockchain related to trust to enable that and that's that's like number one priority that's in the works rack wireless is the first because rack wireless was our outsourced odm for the original healing hospital we know that team extremely well like we've been out there to their factories we spent months almost six months to year with them in person so we know who they are like we know the ceo can like the trust level is very high that's why iraq wireless was a low-hanging fruit and they wanted to take the business they we told them we can't do it we cannot do this profitably we just can't because we don't sell hardware otherwise iraq builds like that's all they do they build hundreds of thousands of pieces of hardware right so this is easy for them and so they took it on uh we're no longer involved dude they've sold like 35 000 units man so you're worried about 120 000 dude there's 35 000 they got a ship as soon as they ship it and those go online we go from 12 000 plus to 47 000. like this dude like that that's gonna happen it's gonna happen between now and march so from march that's in the next year can we get to a hundred thousand uh probably i don't see why not there's four there's four other versions of racks coming wow and the price yeah the price is going down it's only going to go down so the question isn't a hundred thousand units the question is when you get to a million units i guess yeah and it doesn't sound too far no but that's what we need right because because it exactly like airbnb if you want to change behavior you need to have the network available once the network is available then all of the lorawan ecosystem all of the applications all of the amazing pieces of hardware that they build like this tectelic water leak detector it doesn't have to be sexy stuff it's things that help you control water things to help you save and conserve right our our greatest natural resource fresh water it's like tracking your kids tracking your dog tracking your purse right everyone needs to track their louis vuitton like this is a kiko product from korea it's been around for years but but people can't use anywhere else but in seoul korea well you should be able to use it everywhere this tectulic sensor i showed you guys with what it's awesome it's like 20 bucks it's super cheap everyone should have one but we don't we can't it's the network's not there yet right and so that's why i think we've we're tackling this problem it's for us it's completely greenfield i think for for society it's greenfield um if this network was there then everything starts to happen like we i remember early days i used to say we kind of live in the flintstones age we're like cavemen cave women you know things are still so manual we should be in the jetsons we should be living in a jetsons world these are cartoons from like before your time right no no you're right frank are there any wireless networks excluding those in space that span multiple continents like obviously the u.s like verizon t-mobile spring a t like they're not in europe and and you know the vodafone is not here like are you go there's not that many well i in the lower land ecosystem there there's another group called the things network and they've done a great job of using community involvement and volunteer uh just volunteering and building networks they've done a great job of expanding beyond just the european continent they're they're in multiple places around the world i think the only issue for the things network is a matter of incentive right why why would someone someone certainly can volunteer to help the community but why would they do it long term there's not really incentive built in and that's the only difference between helium and and what the things network has done um is that we've added that well well you're right i mean a lot of the i mean when i used to cover telcos at my last job i mean there was so many mesh networks trying to launch in like africa and everyone would fail a month and they get a ton of money because the incentives weren't there why degrade your your hop you know more than three hops your wireless signals get crushed it just never worked right right yeah you know yeah sorry yeah yeah just just to round out the i just to go back to the tokyo a little bit because i find the inverse token econ really exciting you guys recently introduced a new improvement proposal i think it's called hip 20 and basically what it does is and correct me if i'm wrong but basically you impose a semi hard cap pretty much of around 230 240 million hiv because it just gets to a point where you know no more is basically issued and instead of burning the hgnt uh which happens now the h t is like partially redistributed to nodes so that you can have the best of having a hard cap but within that hard cap you have the velocity of the hnt to run the network i think that's incredible what's what's the status there how and how's that going and did i get that right yeah i know you got it right and you actually think you you got it better than i do i think you've done a great job explaining it um this is a hip proposal so it's a helium improvement proposal uh we call it hip 20 is related to the h t max supply this is a proposal that was introduced by uh community members uh so healing wasn't really we weren't involved with this uh proposal but uh community members like phil and tushar and armand introduced it on november 4th and it's going to basically create a net cap supply of i think it's 240 but i think in reality it's closer to 220 or something like 220 million versus 240 million i think like 17 or 17 million were lost or burned i forgot the number there but there's something it's both well it's both burn also block times were slower in the beginning because we had you know we had blockchain issues and due to that timing uh you know we're not we're not minting as many tokens as we wanted to uh or as a blockchain had planned so just i mean just for the audience sake we didn't pre-mine any tokens so we're more like bitcoin in that tokens only come through mining and we're no longer the goal is to not make it infinite supply so we were infinite supply and i think the issue with infinite supply um from what we've seen is is that it's hard for people to understand especially folks that understand bitcoin they don't really understand this idea of infinite supply and the other is on on the burn and meant equilibrium side to burn h t at a faster pace means faster adoption of iot applications as well as iot the iot network from helium and that that takes time you know what we've learned is uh you get lots of pilots lots of pocs but for full on at scale adoption it just takes time companies have to go through their processes to reduce risk and ultimately decide to make us make a change and changing is always the hardest part for any for any technology the other thing is obviously the having a greater burn is awesome but i think having the hard cap in place just sends a great message to people that want to hold helium and not just users but i mean we talked earlier about those holding data credits on their balance sheet i mean you may have large chilean miners that want to hold h t on their balance sheet instead of selling it so it makes more sense there it does and also i think from a crypto enthusiast perspective like the third bucket that that's very important for helium is the crypto folks it it draws in and i think a crypto audience that's used to mining the blockchain audi or the bitcoin audience they get they understand the hard cap they understand that mining rewards relate to that is is has a certain value behind it um and i think what we've done clever here that the community has done really is something called net emissions which allows you to have a hard cap but also allows you to be able to burn uh hnt and create more hnt on top of the cap as needed and that net emissions idea enables burn and mint to co coexist with a hard cap so those are like innovations within the crypto blockchain world that i think are are pretty cool and i i think i think especially folks in the in the uh both the bitcoin and ethereum world i hope they take note of it because you know i know we're not we're completely outside of those communities and outside those circles and i i feel like we're many times outside of crypto in general but i think i think this application by being focused and being specific in our use case here related to connectivity in building our networks i think it enables us to focus in on real applications that potentially can change economies i mean that's what that's what we want to do right we want to create a network that changes the economy no no i i think that's great i mean the way i see it from from your perspective is that i mean you have those three groups you talked about the builders the users um and then what was the last one the crypto native big crypto yeah the cool part is you have the crypto native people now evolving your your token dynamics that they could be able to co-exist to help build a network on the builder's side you have third parties rolling out cheaper products and then that's right back on the use case side what's what's the biggest push there i mean is it i i saw a couple months ago you guys had like a plethora of like aws integrations and thing along things along those lines how's that going down it's great so on the on the usage side we do everything we can to lower barrier to usage right we have the data credit concept which essentially if you want to try helium as a as a corporate entity you could use your corporate credit card and for a few hundred dollars you can start to try heck for ten dollars you can try i mean it's it's easy it's very low barrier right and everything we do is low cost or no cost it's open it's free um because we want adoption and we want people to use the network as much as we can and so that's that's a there again in that aspect there's no like magic bullet here to all of a sudden you know recruit hundreds of thousands of devices you know i think at this point we probably on our uh console helium console which is the onboarding platform i think we're close to about 5 000 users now that's using console and that's everyone from customers trying to network to developers using our free tools um and we have like i want to say 10 to 12 000 sensors now active on the network wow it's constantly on now it didn't just happen overnight it's taken us all a lot of effort on the helium side on the sales and marketing business development side you know nurturing customers and helping them understand that the risk of trying is very low so having a leap of faith and trying that is important the the bigger the network has gotten the more coverage that the people's network has has created it's helped with that it's really helped us you know drive belief that hey this is real it's not vaporware um so that's one aspect it's just helium grinding it out you know we've got our internal bd teams split by region focused on you know nurturing customers to try the helium network and we're also trying to establish partnerships in that world partnering with sensor makers like tectelic and digital matters uh application guys like smart mimic and care band those are important and of course you know getting customers like like lime scooters and specialized bikes and nestle and these are some big brands that are trying this uh it's important again it's slow they're they're all gonna be slow they're all gonna go through their uh process to determine if this is the right fit for them but our our job was just to make it low barrier making trying super easy right and we we just need to do this thousands of times over not just in the us but we need to use in europe in china in southeast asia and this is where the expansion of helium is is really focused we are trying to build networks in europe we're trying to build networks in southeast asia and china we're doing it on our own with third-party manufacturers building hot spots i'm trying to you know i'm trying to get the attention of guys like things network and just work out a partnership to convert them all onto helium that way you have a massive global network instantly and have them use the network like we helium inc as a company is just an enabler we open source everything we do we don't make any money on any of this stuff right we want everyone to take it and use it as much as we can and so it's almost like we we're we're we're like the linux foundation in the world of linux right yeah and frank just just just today again at one point you just brought up the community how did you like what was the role though in like getting the sub communities live because like when i got my nodes i wanted to upgrade my antennas and i'm pretty sure i found a discord channel with like 300 people in it we're all going back and forth on what antennas yeah and people were literally testing like you know the range of these things in real time and the power and should use different supplies it was crazy like how do you incentivize those niche communities man you know that that is uh we really didn't do much to incentivize folks uh in the early early days um gosh in the early days i think our community was on slack we weren't even that was probably it yeah yeah we were on slack at the time and what we had like a couple of folks that are like really technical on the iot side they were radio radio wave engineers or they were signals and systems background and i think because their day job was related to this in that they understood connectivity really they understand networking and they understood antennas and physics they were just in their spare time on slack uh helping everyone and giving suggestions on antennas how to mount them how to ground them and those were just like grassroots efforts healing we didn't give them anything like we did not give them anything other than the fact that they were passionate and they believed that this could be the way in which a new network could could grow and they were just helping us along a lot of iot folks believe in our fundamental premise that the reason why iot hasn't picked up and hasn't hasn't grown to the promise that you know a lot of researchers have talked about is because there is no network there's no cheap low-cost unified like global network that allows them to connect to the internet it just doesn't exist right everyone everyone that's tried to build like you mentioned they all try to tax there's always this like rent this idea that they want to be rent seekers right every part of the process you want to collect little bits of money well that's exactly the wrong way as soon as you do that for little sensors the economics doesn't work and it's fair because it hasn't no it hasn't and so we can't do it that way that's why this blockchain is for us really the answer the cryptocurrency is the answer for this there is no rent seeking here it's owned by everyone you all benefit the entire ecosystem benefits if we all group together and build it together we just need to expand beyond the us like we have to we have to go into europe we through either partnerships with guys like things network or ourselves uh we have to go to asia we have to go to china there are just mass amounts of applications a lot of innovation and iot happening elsewhere that that could use this network right away no i'm with you i totally agree with you and frank just in closing um has been awesome i mean what are the biggest risks to helium like there's a lot right like is it you know is it the h t price is it the tech which we didn't have time to get into we'll do that on another podcast um or is it you know could att and verizon dropped their iot costs to zero dollars for a month like what are what are the biggest risks in your mind uh i i think it's probably education uh and awareness and speed of doing that i in the beginning if you asked me this question you know um uh 16 months ago or 12 months ago when we were just launching in austin texas i i would i would tell you hey it's like adoption like i'm worried that people won't do this i'm no longer worried now i know people are going to do this and and it's not even us pushing it anymore it's the people's network it's hnt army they're pushing it uh which is fantastic um i think for us it's the two things that matter most is continuous momentum with our community it can't just be helium taking on the burden of driving usage we need the community we need the h t army we need the people's member to drive usage also it can't just be us because we can only do so much and i think so we have to be smarter there especially as we expand outside the us and we get into markets that have different cultures different practices different behaviors we need local we need local ambassadors there and so our ability to expand internationally i think is a huge uh milestone that's a huge milestone we have to achieve and we can't do it alone we need the community to help us here the other absolutely is hnt value like how how hnt value is in the marketplace i would be lying if i if i ignore that right that is absolutely because that's the incentive so if the network is 50 000 hotspots what's the incentive to for the 50 0001 person in china or in japan or in south korea to go and buy a hotspot and do it it's because h t value keeps going like this right it doesn't matter if you're mining one token a week or half a token it won't matter if the value keeps going up right well the crazy part is i mean when you go from 12 000 nodes to 220 000 nodes at an issuance rate that's potentially having every two years under the new hip i mean that's you know a tenth of the rewards to the nodes and the having impedes that i mean that yeah it definitely makes sense that there are incentives to get involved yeah and there's absolute risk there right that's a huge risk in that yeah if you have and the value doesn't double that's a problem right i mean let's just be open about it we can't control that i don't know how to control that we shouldn't control that that's that is sort of a world of of trading and and whatever that we we can't touch healing isn't involved so you know i don't know it's it's really up to the community like if everyone believes that this network should exist and needs to exist in the long term then these are all the things that have to happen you know i think for for helium just in closing with you guys on the tech side that we we realized helium isn't a company that's trying to make money in iot we're not we're not that we are purely we've become purely a blockchain crypto company that has a massive use case and it's called building wireless networks that's that's that's what we do we and we do it through incentive of the blockchain itself um today we're addressing the green field this is all it's all greenfield with iot there's a massive need wi-fi six in certain countries wi-fi is a problem there isn't wi-fi available everywhere in parts of africa in nairobi and kenya it's an issue can helium solve that absolutely helium's blockchain can run on wi-fi six there's no reason it can't we have prototypes it works um we have we don't talk about it much right because we want to focus we're we're staying focused we want the community to focus but could healing blockchain run on wi-fi and create wi-fi networks yes it can could we run incredible we run on 5g microcells and provide 5g network coverage around the world yes we can that's that's the future so if you think about where is helium going to go where's the 35 people that we have today where are we taking this we are taking this to crown castle and we're taking this to american tower and all the other tower guys around the world their business is over helium is coming 5g networks will all be on helium so frank i i can't let you go with that i'm too interested now what what does that mean though do you like do people go out and buy 5g nodes and then they run the helium network on that node and it's a different network from the iot or just a different bandwidth amount like how does that work yeah so i think the best applications uh if you think about it is you know um in like in africa where infrastructure is all new instead of one conglomerate going into africa and building and rolling out 5g towers every person in africa or in let's just use nairobi or kenya every person could become a tower and every person can offer 5g connectivity using unlicensed spectrum in 5g or if if we can partner with a telco provider in nairobi in in kenya the government can allow for their spectrum to run and use helium's blockchain so that the the apple phones and the in the in the android phones in that country all use some helium blockchain as a means to create for network creation as well as packet transfers that that's what i'm talking about that's our blockchain yeah that's any our blockchain can become the spark an incentive to create wireless connectivity that's owned and powered by the people the people's network could power everything it doesn't have to be just iot i don't think people like you know you go you jump country to country i mean the dynamics are so different like in africa i mean it's so hard to build cell towers because frankly they get destroyed all the time like there's different incentives there for people like if you have people that are are incentivized to protect a common resource that they can all actually pursue like that's a pretty interesting kind of way that's right boy thanks and we're not saying it's not healing owned right we're not saying oh helen's gonna go raise a bunch of money and start to build towers we're not we're going to say to the people there here you go here here is a 5g healing hotspot open sourced take it go and build your own network here you go yeah that's frank i'm about to have you on again soon man what's your schedule like tomorrow but now it's uh frank this has been awesome man i really appreciate your time obviously a huge fan full disclosure i own helium and a bunch of nodes as well and i'll probably end up getting some more at some point but frank thanks again for your time i really appreciate it thank you tom i appreciate the opportunity to tell our story thank you

Channel: The Delphi Podcast

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Id: psD-Tvf15Us

Length: 48min 43sec (2923 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020