One Million Hotspots, $6,500 in Monthly Usage: Helium's DePIN Crisis and the Solana Migration

1. The People's Network, Built One Window at a Time

Helium was founded in 2013 by Amir Haleem, Shawn Fanning, and Sean Carey with a mission to build decentralized wireless infrastructure for the Internet of Things. Fanning was already known as the Napster cofounder; Haleem was a prominent game designer. Forbes reported five years of failed non-crypto product launches backed by $50 million in venture investments before the company pivoted to tokens and the People's Network debuted in August 2019.^[4][1]

The core pitch was unusually concrete for a crypto project. Consumers bought a hotspot device costing anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, plugged it in at home, and nearby low-power devices would route data through it, earning the owner Helium's HNT token: the more data relayed, the more HNT the owner could earn. The hotspots ran on LongFi, a protocol pairing the LoRaWAN long-range radio standard with Helium's proprietary blockchain.^[2][4]

Adoption rapidly outran initial expectations. By July 2021, more than 100,000 hotspots were online, though Forbes noted HNT rewards were already declining. Consumers collectively spent an estimated $500 million on hotspot hardware. At peak, the Solana Foundation described almost one million hotspots deployed, with coverage across 192 countries. Deployed counted devices ever onboarded onto the registry — not that one million stayed active, nor annual hardware sales.^[1][3]

Capital chased the ballooning network. In August 2021, Andreessen Horowitz led a $110 million token sale, and HNT surged to $55 that November. In February 2022, reincorporated under the corporate banner Nova Labs, the company announced another $200 million funding round at a stated valuation of $1.2 billion.^[1]

"This is the fastest rollout of a global wireless network in history."^[1]

— Amir Haleem, Helium cofounder and CEO, blog post announcing the February 2022 funding (as quoted by Forbes)

2. $6,500 of Demand in a Single Month

The credibility crisis struck in July 2022, sparked by Helium's marketing materials. Helium's homepage featured logos from scooter company Lime and Salesforce as showcase users. When asked, Lime told Mashable it had no relationship with Helium since 2019 beyond brief initial testing. Salesforce spokesperson Ashley Eliasoph told The Verge directly that "Helium is not a Salesforce partner," adding that the customer graphic "is not accurate." Within hours of publication, Helium stripped both logos from its homepage.^[2]

Then came the devastating usage figure. A report from The Generalist, cited by The Verge, revealed that only around $6,500 worth of data credits had been spent across the entire network in a single month to access data. The referent is critical because the number has been frequently misquoted: this was network-wide data-credit spend over one month, reported in July 2022 for the preceding month. It was never an individual miner's earnings, and never an annual total.^[2]

Forbes exposed the underlying economic imbalance two months later using Helium's own internal figures. Between June 2021 and August 2022, just $92,000 in revenue came from data actually moving across the network — set against $250 million raised from venture investors. During that same fourteen-month window, $53.3 million flowed in from hotspot registration and device-authentication fees. The network was generating the vast majority of its revenue from new builders paying onboarding fees to join, not from commercial customers consuming bandwidth.^[1]

Individual hotspot hosts felt the squeeze immediately. Dulce Davis in Houston paid $500 for a hotspot, waited over six months for delivery, and earned about $5 worth of tokens in three months. In Canada, Jonathan Newman waited eight months and realized his unit was on pace for roughly $150 a year, remarking it would take years to break even. Haleem defended the model to Forbes, arguing data demand "doesn't happen overnight" and that after hardware partners commit, "we expect it to take years before that device actually materializes in any meaningful scale."^[1]

"Is Helium a spectacular failure and proof that web3 sucks? I'd say it's just getting started."^[1]

— Amir Haleem, tweet of July 2022, responding to criticism over low hotspot earnings (as quoted by Forbes)

3. A Community Vote and a Deliberately Boring Migration

The turnaround required confronting technical realities: Helium's bespoke blockchain had become a bottleneck. On the original chain, residential hotspots participated directly in consensus to confirm chain state. As Helium Foundation COO Scott Sigel later explained, having consensus run on home routers meant a major internet service provider outage could stall the entire blockchain. Furthermore, in 2021 Helium had committed to becoming a "network of networks," preparing to onboard 5G cellular hardware alongside IoT.^[4]

The Helium Foundation submitted a proposal to migrate the entire network to Solana, and the community approved the measure "by an overwhelming margin," according to Sigel. The architectural breakthrough was Solana's newly launched state compression: nearly one million deployed hotspots would be minted as compressed NFTs, transforming physical hardware nodes into lightweight, cost-effective on-chain digital credentials.^[4]

The migration finished in April 2023, characterized by the Solana Foundation as one of the most significant layer 1 blockchain migrations ever. The financial mechanics made the case. According to the foundation's worked example, minting 900,000 compressed NFTs cost roughly $122 at April 2023 prices (0.3 SOL storage and 5 SOL in transactions), compared to approximately $260,000 (~10,800 SOL) for uncompressed equivalents. Sigel noted that compression made the migration economically viable "by several orders of magnitude."^[3][4]

Device statistics require the same rigorous distinction as the revenue data. While Solana's case studies cite almost one million hotspots deployed and minted as NFTs, they separately recorded hundreds of thousands of active hotspots operating across more than 170 countries in mid-2023. Deployed reflects cumulative hardware onboarded, active counts functioning nodes, and neither indicates annual sales — an essential boundary obscured during the bull market.^[3][4]

"No hiccups and nothing to report. It was boring! That's exactly what we were hoping for."^[4]

— Scott Sigel, COO, Helium Foundation, on the April 2023 migration

4. The Hybrid 5G Experiment, With Expiration Dates

The cellular expansion took root in September 2022 when Helium Mobile partnered with T-Mobile, with DISH also collaborating. Forbes reported that Helium paid T-Mobile for cellular network access rather than the reverse, while launching a new MOBILE token to incentivize 5G builders investing $1,000 to $2,600 per radio. By April 2023, the community had deployed more than 8,000 5G radios.^[5][1][3]

In August 2023, Helium Mobile launched a Miami pilot, expanding in December 2023 to a nationwide unlimited talk, text, and data plan at $20 per month. The service was explicitly built as a hybrid architecture rather than a self-contained carrier replacement, combining nationwide carrier coverage with crowd-sourced local hotspots.^[5]

"While Helium Mobile subscribers get wireless coverage from our partner network (the nation's largest, fastest 5G network), they're also covered by the people-built Helium Network."^[5]

— Helium Mobile, blog post of July 15, 2024

In July 2024, Helium Mobile announced it had surpassed 100,000 sign-ups — up from 30,000 at the start of 2024 — supported by over 14,000 community hotspots across the United States, all self-reported figures. Yet the offering came with defined temporal limits. Under Helium Mobile's official legacy terms, effective January 27, 2026, the $5 and $20 unlimited plans were formally retired, with prepaid subscriptions honored through their paid terms. Those same terms emphasize that coverage maps "only approximate" service areas and that token rewards remain variable and discretionary at the company's sole discretion, subject to modification or termination without notice.^[5][6]

Helium's evolution demonstrates a measured transition rather than a triumphalist resurrection. Token incentives bootstrapped almost one million deployed hotspots; the demand reckoning forced a candid accounting of $92,000 in data revenue against $53.3 million in onboarding fees; a community vote migrated the fleet to Solana via compressed NFTs; and the hybrid 5G rollout logged specific milestones — 100,000 sign-ups followed by retired legacy plans — rather than an unconditional victory. The central question raised by The Verge's $6,500 monthly data revelation remains open, tested now on a national cellular stage.^[1][2][6]