Crypto-Powered IoT Networks Are On Their Way to Over 250 US Cities

The company quickly sold out of its first production run designated for the Texas capital, but now Helium is shipping units much more broadly, to 263 cities around the United States, CoinDesk has learned.

To recap, Helium is a network meant to help IoT devices like e-scooters, simple sensors and pet trackers get low-volume data to the internet quickly and at very low cost.

At-home Helium hotspots mine helium tokens by performing tasks useful to the network, such as verifying the location of nodes, the sequence of data and the location of devices sending data over the network.

The product attracted a lot of people interested in networking who weren't necessarily well-versed in crypto, so Helium had to make a number of design decisions to improve the user experience.

Some of these early enthusiasts are buying as many as 50 Helium hotspots and deploying them themselves around geographic areas, making Helium's work much easier.

More interestingly, Helium had to learn about how networking works in real situations.

Helium hotspots are constantly trying to prove their location by sending out signals and triangulating with other nodes on the network.

Say, scooter company using the network would have its data credits topped up, allowing the company's scooters to send data over the Helium network.

Helium's initial partners, such as food conglomerate Nestlé and pet-tracking company InvisiLeash, are using its network now but not yet paying for it, Mong said.

A large farm that wants to collect data from sensors, for example, could throw up a few Helium hotspots for less than a few thousand dollars and cover an enormous amount of land.