DeFi
Helium listed Salesforce and Lime as partners, but said the two companies are not working together. Helium’s revenue has dwindled to $6.5 million per month.
Helium is in trouble this week after several companies said they weren’t using Helium but had it listed as a use case on Helium’s site. Helium is a blockchain project that acts as a decentralized, user-driven wireless network. This is sort of like Mesh Net competing against typical internet providers who incentivize users to run nodes that provide network availability via HNT tokens.
Helium’s most recent scandal came when both Salesforce and Lime, whose icons are listed in Helium’s active partners section, said they are not currently affiliated with Helium. Lime said it participated in the first tests in 2019, but Salesforce simply said there was no partnership.
In response, Heliums CEO Amir Haleem said: series of tweets By describing how some of these partnerships have taken place, Helium may have come to misunderstand the current state of its relationship with these companies. “We have worked with companies large and small over the years. Many of these engagements have been pilots and trials, which may or may not result in larger applications. […] Some users on the network we know, others we don’t. This is the nature of permissionless networks that anyone can use. “
Haleem’s stance was that this kind of marketing had verbal approval, but with people’s roles constantly changing, verbal approval was no longer sufficient. Haleem said he would exclude companies without written approval from the list. The company removed only Lime and Salesforce. From my point of view, it’s hard to imagine that Helium, who was pitching himself as a partner, didn’t realize the two big companies weren’t using his network.
Is helium a good investment?
Helium has raised $365 million with top venture capital firm a16z as the lead investor, with private investors spending an estimated $250 million on Hotspot nodes. Most of these nodes were purchased for hundreds to thousands of dollars when node operators were earning around $100 per month. that has changed.
Currently, the average node earns around $20 per month, with some users reporting much lower earnings. If you go to Helium’s subreddit, you’ll find a constant stream of people posting about their prices being lowered.
That’s the state of the network. In the next 12 months, the reward will be cut in half again, and once the order is fulfilled, a large number of backorders of his miners will be online. This means that node operator rewards are likely to go down from here.
Outside of obscure DeFi projects, it’s rare to see a project that is financially worse than Helium. With all this money, Helium was able to generate a whopping $6,500 a month in revenue. Payments to node operators, like many crypto project rewards, are a combination of venture capital investor-funded subsidies and diluted issuance of underlying tokens.
Many of the details in this article are based on: Liron Shapira’s Twitter thread Analyze helium finances.
