Helium

Founded in 2013, Helium spent years pursuing decentralized wireless infrastructure before first issuing HNT on 2019-07-29. Hotspot operators supplied coverage and earned protocol rewards; users acquired Data Credits by burning HNT to pay predictable, dollar-priced network fees.

HIP 20 formalized two-year halvings and net emissions. Its often-cited roughly 223 million maximum reflected underproduction under the original schedule, but that figure is no longer a complete description after the later HIP 149 decision.

HIP 70 moved token, governance, and economic accounting to Solana and shifted Proof-of-Coverage and data accounting toward off-chain oracles. The cutover began on 2023-04-18 and completion was reported on 2023-04-19, so both dates appear in reliable records.

The migration reduced the burden of maintaining a custom chain, but it also made Solana program upgrades, circuit breakers, Squads multisigs, and oracle operations explicit trust assumptions. HNT's mint authority remains a circuit-breaker program address rather than a null authority.

HIP 138 stopped new IOT and MOBILE issuance and returned subnetwork rewards to HNT; on-chain mint authorities for IOT and MOBILE are now null. Governance uses locked, non-transferable veHNT rather than freely held HNT.

Approved HIP 149 proposes roughly 141 million supplemental HNT over 36 months, removes Proof-of-Coverage rewards, and directs the supplemental issuance to a Nova Labs receiving entity under an advisory and vote-based framework. Official material says implementation is underway while secondary reporting describes parts as live, so CoinYQ does not invent a single activation timestamp.