Anyone who hears that an internet-of-things startup is getting into blockchain technology would be forgiven for laughing it off as another hollow scheme. But Amir Haleem, cofounder of Helium, says he has no interest in making a quick buck off the irrational exuberance that permeates the cryptocurrency world. In fact, just the opposite—he’s interested in cryptocurrency only as a way to build a true internet of things, once and for all. And he knows his idea is so far-out it could take a while before people catch on.

Haleem started Helium in 2013, along with Napster creator Shawn Fanning. The company’s first product, which is now on the market, is a hardware system that uses a homegrown wireless standard to provide long-range, low-power wireless coverage for devices like sensors that track and monitor medicine or food supply chains. Software routes the data to internet-based applications hosted by whoever owns the sensors.

But the internet of things hasn’t materialized as many people thought it would, says Haleem, at least for low-power devices. That’s because there’s little incentive to build widespread wireless coverage that is secure, reliable, and super-cheap. Established wireless carriers don’t see a business case for building networks geared for devices that might transmit less than a dollar’s worth of data per year, he says.

As one example, Helium is working with a pharmaceutical company that wants to track individual medicine bottles and monitor their temperature in close to real time, without interruption. That product can’t exist today, says Haleem, because it can’t rely on having coverage everywhere it goes. He and his colleagues are convinced they can use a blockchain to change that. The plan is to launch a new public distributed ledger like the one underlying Bitcoin, but replace the “proof-of-work” process Bitcoin’s miners use to secure its ledger of peer-to-peer payments with a novel system that Helium calls “proof of coverage.”

Bitcoin miners expend large amounts of computing power to prove that they did the work required to cryptographically secure the blockchain. Helium has come up with something similar, monitoring the physical signatures created when a device emits radio waves to cryptographically verify that they are providing coverage in a specific location.