Helium project with the idea to provide a reliable connectivity platform for iOT devices if success can be the answer to these complex questions.

Overview

Helium is a company founded in 2013 by Shawn Fanning, Amir Haleem, and Sean Carey with a mission to make it easier to build connected devices.

In the area of this project, Helium is a wide-area wireless networking system, a blockchain and a protocol token.

The connectivity issue that the industry has been struggling with for all these years is that the network providers have been trying to operate alone.

They had to determine the communication structure as well as raise the money to put their plans into actions. Helium takes advantage of blockchain technology to incentivize a two-sided marketplace where both network providers and consumers collaborate effortlessly. The result is that wireless network becomes a community-owned commodity that can be purchased by anyone, at anytime, from anywhere in the world, at a fraction of today’s costs.

Helium provides a decentralized machine network (DMN) through its own brand- new blockchain, wireless network, and open-source software - all are linked by gateways (the product is still in R&D stage). Gateway operators a.k.a miners can be anyone in the world which is capable of providing wireless network coverage for devices and mine tokens for owners while users of the network use tokens to connect their devices to the internet via gateways.

Token metrics

Currently, the team does not disclose any information about token sales plan, total supply, token symbol,token price, token distribution, hard cap, soft cap since they announced to emphasize more on tech development. All we know is that Helium will launch a private testnet in San Francisco in August 2018 and the Network in Q4 2018.

Key tech

Unique physical blockchain : First of all, when mentioning blockchain, we immediately think about security, decentralized and a trustless And that's what Helium is seeking for and a great combination to compensate for the downside of iOT industry. The Helium Blockchain is built from the root to incentivize anyone who is capable of providing an affordable, non-proprietary, long range, power-saving network coverage to connect devices, sensors and machines to the Internet. They do that through allowing anyone to deploy a Helium Gateway; a wireless hotspot for machines, which are essentially RF wireless hotspots that use “proof of coverage"consensus mechanism to reward “miners” (Helium gateway deployers) for keeping the gateway running and providing coverage for applications and devices.

Currently, the Helium blockchain is purely on whitepaper mode and the team is still in the process of building its own blockchain. For more details about Helium blockchain, please read the following article and Helium whitepaper:

https://blog.helium.com/introducing-the-helium-blockchain-dc2f8997083c

Figure 1: System overview (Source: Helium whitepaper)

Unique consensus mechanism: There are 3 unique consensus mechanisms that Helium applied:

Proof of coverage: Unlike other blockchain proofs which require heavy computing that is largely wasted, Proof-of-coverage is a new and novel proof used to prove valid location and wireless network coverage by providers

Proof of location: outline a system for interpreting the physical geolocation of a machine using WHIP without the need for expensive and power-hungry satellite location hardware. Machines can make immutable, secure, and verifiable claims about their location at a given moment in time which is recorded in the blockchain.

Proof of serialisation: Proof-of-Serialization based on Google’s Roughtime protocol allows miners to prove they are accurately representing time relative to others on the network in a cryptographically secure way.

Helium combines it all with an asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant protocol that provides an extremely high transaction rate (thousands per second instead of a handful), transaction encryption and censorship resilience, to create our new Helium Consensus Protocol.

WHIP Wireless Protocol: a new open-source and standards-compliant wireless network protocol, called WHIP, designed for low power machines over vast This protocol is designed to run on existing commodity radio chips available from dozens of manufacturers with no proprietary technologies or modulation schemes required.

Use cases

From industrial maintenance automation to the tracking of pharmaceuticals and food supply chains, Helium solve a wide range of industries due to the shortcomings of IoT. MIT reports that Helium is working with a pharmaceutical company that wants to track individual medicine bottles and their temperature in near real time. For more details, please read the article:

https://internetofbusiness.com/helium-blockchain-machine-network-iot-unleashed/

MVP

On Technical FAQ roundup: May category of Helium blog, the project said that they have been working to develop and produce a new gateway and module and would soon have a private testnet online.

Previously, the company's current generation hardware,which is in production with 1000s of developers and companies but not contributing to the mining operations and new network is sold and can be found here: https://www.helium.com/store

Therefore, we can expect that this is not another ICO project in the crypto world that purely have idea without a single test product.

Development team

Helium possesses a strong team with 20 core members - quite imbalanced combination between geeks and businessmen. Helium has 9 software engineers, however, they are still lack of blockchain experience. There are only 2 members in charge of marketing since the team is focusing on tech development.

Shawn Fanning is the founder of Helium, an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and angel investor. He developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file sharing platforms, in 1999. The popularity of Napster was widespread and Fanning was featured on the cover of Time magazine. He also founded Rupture and co-founded Path and Airtime, all popular applications that he was involved in developing.

Amir Haleem is also the CEO and founder of Helium. He has previously co-founded and in charge of CTO at Diversion as well as possessing long experience in gaming industry.

Advisors & Investors

Helium has raised equity funding from some of the most prominent Venture Capital (VC) firms in the world including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Khosla Ventures, FirstMark Capital, HSB/MunichRe Ventures and others. We have verified the portfolios of all VCs and on Crunchbase and can confirm that the information is accurate.

With regard to advisors, we also verified the identity of all the members, a few names worths mentioning here are Vinod Khosla - Founder of Khosla Ventures, Bruce Armstrong - Partner of Khosla Ventures, Jacqueline LeSage Krause from Munich Re/HSB Ventures, Matt Turck - Partner of FirstMark Capital, Andy Wheeler - Partner of GV.

Roadmap

The vision of Helium project is long-term and macro when they aim to target the global market. However, Helium still does not have a specific roadmap as they are initially focusing on the creating the technology and developing their gateway prototypes. What puts the investors at ease instead of the roadmap is the long list of clients - a few names worth mentioning here are Google Cloud, Microsoft and Github.

Community

Hellium's social media channels currently still do not have much interaction between the project and the followers. This can be attribute to the emphasis of Helium team on tech development before deploying marketing strategy later.

For more details, please follow:

Website: https://www.helium.com/

Blog: https://blog.helium.com/

Whitepaper: http://whitepaper.helium.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heliumsystems - 840 likes

Twitter: https://twitter.com/helium - 2100 followers

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/helium-systems/ - 673 followers

Telegram: https://twitter.com/helium - 4800 members

Slack: https://helium-community.slack.com/

Github: https://github.com/helium

Contact Email : hello@helium.com

Conclusion

Although Helium does not disclose any information about the private sales and crowfunding phase since the team is focusing on the tech right now, the project is still a dare-devil idea to challenge those giants in network providing industry. The team needs to hire more blockchain experts for the geeks' team and emphasize on marketing activities to reach more followers and their global-scale goal.

Helium's COO Frank Mong at iOT World 2018 once said, "Even if the company goes away, you still have access to the intellectual property", therefore, we can highly expect in the near future whether the project will succeed or not, it will somehow contribute something valuable to the community and the fragmented infrastructure of a new machine-to-machine economy.

It can be one small step of Helium, one giant leap for the iOT era.

* This article is not a financial advice. Do your own research before investing on ICO.

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