WTF is…Helium?
By: Yunt Capital
Tags: IoT, Crypto, Cryptocurrency, Decentralized

Brass Tacks

First, what’s an IoT device? These are all the ‘smart’ devices you’re using and seeing around the house. Light bulbs, fridges, sensors, watches, all the simple devices we’re seeing in our homes more and more each day.

These devices all need to communicate through the internet. Some of these are easy, you connect them to the internet via your home network. But what about all devices that don’t connect to your home network? Air monitoring, people tracking (dementia patients), scooter rental tracking, tracking of vehicles and countless other applications. Cellular is too expensive a solution to add to these, wifi is much cheaper and easier. But without a strong wifi backbone there’s no way to support this. Helium fixes that.

Helium is incentivizing people to build this backbone for them. You can buy a ‘miner’ which is basically a proprietary router which will create a mesh network. These routers talk to each other to verify they’re on the network and part of the network. By being up, and being surrounded by other miners, they earn HNT which is the native currency of the Helium network.

What does that mean? People purchase and install ‘miners’. These miners then connect to your internet and provides a decentralized backbone for IoT Devices.

How Can I Participate?

First thing to do is check to see if you have any other miners near you? You need a few but not too many. But first let’s see if you have any near you:

First type your address in here.

You’ll see a picture like this:

Anything in the hexagon does not help you. These are all too close, the point of the network is to expand the network. Having 20 in a house won’t help, they need to be slightly outside this range. The more you can touch outside of this range the more rewards.

The next site you can go to is the Helium Explorer:

If you found a hotspot near you, you can enter here and look it up to see what kind of rewards you can earn near you. Or you can just search around until you find your neighborhood and see what exists. Each green dot below is a miner.

The example above is Quick-Mulberry-Badger which earned 61.81 HNT in the last 30 days (~$800 at the time of this writing). There’s lots of Others I’ve looked at that have earned in excess of 1000 HNT in 30 days.

Is This Profitable?

HNT has performed extremely well during the past year. To determine an example Return on Investment (ROI) in your area find a miner near you and use those rewards as a base . Electricity cost for a miner is the equivalent of a 12V light bulb. This isn’t proof of work, it’s just powering a router.

Indoor miners are about $450 from Parlay Labs (US Only). In the above example the ROI is approximately 15–20 days depending upon the price of HNT at the time.

While outdoor miners were lagging behind indoor miners as they were waiting on FCC approval, that looks to be cleared up now and an outdoor miner will run you about $550. The main trouble with miners right now is the trouble everyone is seeing: chip shortages and shipping issues. I’ve had two miners on order since late February and they’re due sometime this month.

Difficulty Increase:

5,000,000 HNT is given out to miners every month. As miners increase, this number is split between more people. On August 1st, 2021 this reward halved. So HNT Miners are increasing as pre-orders are being fulfilled and the rewards will switch to 2,500,000 HNT given out to miners soon.

Indoor or Outdoor?

I bought two indoor miners. I’m installing them at a house my niece rents and another where a niece owns. I didn’t want to be climbing on their roofs and installing something major outside of homes I don’t own. These are simple and easy to install in a 2nd floor window.

If you own and are comfortable mounting a miner to your outside wall or preferably roof, outdoor miners have much better range and are typically more profitable. They also have a much longer lead time right now.

Competition?

My biggest competition concern here is Internet Service Providers. Xfinity already has a wifi network offered on every router they supply to their customers. They could easily open these up to IoT devices and outpace Helium, especially in rural areas.

Closing Thoughts

Helium is a novel approach to solving the a longstanding problem with connected devices. How this holds up long term, and as other potential players like traditional ISPs get involved, is anyone’s guess. That said the current reward system and fairly low barrier to entry makes Helium a compelling new technology and one to keep an eye on.