Show notes
Amir Haleem (CEO, Nova Labs & Founder, Helium) talks with Austin about the Helium story and the current proposal to move Helium to the Solana blockchain.0:00 - Introduction1:05 - Origins of the Helium network5:24 - Early challenges for Helium7:19 - Helium’s unique growth and economic models compared to other blockchains11:35 - The geo-specificity of Helium’s rewards14:18 - Why Helium started on its own L1 16:55 - Current disadvantages of Helium running on its own L1 20:46 - Why the time is right for a Helium migration24:28 - Why Solana is the best scaling solution for Helium28:56 - Composability as parts of the Helium network move off chain30:57 - Solana’s role in supporting amazing applications32:12 - How a migration will help Helium reclaim its internal engineering power34:36 - How the upcoming vote will impact Helium validators and hotspot operators36:27 - How Helium’s migration will open up the Solana ecosystem to its community37:36 - Recent developments in cellular networks41:59 - How long will Helium’s migration onto Solana take, and what will it entail?DISCLAIMERThe content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, options, futures, or other derivatives related to securities in any jurisdiction, nor should not be relied upon as advice to buy, sell or hold any of the foregoing. This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor. Solana Foundation Foundation and its agents, advisors, council members, officers and employees (the “Foundation Parties”) make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information herein and expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or any errors or omissions therein. The Foundation Parties shall have no liability whatsoever, under contract, tort, trust or otherwise, to any person arising from or related to the content or any use of the information contained herein by you or any of your representatives.Austin: I'm Austin. This is the Solana podcast. Today, we're talking with Amir Haleem, the founder of the Helium network and CEO of Nova Labs. Helium since its beginning has operated its own layer 1 blockchain, but in a process set forward several months ago, and which has sort of come to a community governance vote in HIP 70, the network is actually proposing switching from operating its own layer 1 to operating on another layer 1. Uh, in the details of HIP 70, the core developers and core contributors are recommending a move to the Solana blockchain as the new home for the Helium network. So we're gonna talk a bit about that today, some of the history of Helium, and how the network, uh, sets itself apart from other blockchains, uh, which is pretty interesting because it's based much more heavily on real world usage and physical hardware, as opposed to simply a software abstraction layer. So, Amir, welcome to the Solana Podcast. Amir: Hi, thanks for having me. Austin: Great to have you here. Um, so let's kind of start at the level set here. Um, where did the original idea for Helium come from? Amir: So Helium has been around as a company, uh, for a little while and we, uh, we always intended to try and build, really, a sensor network, that was the original intention, right? It's like, if you wanted to build a big, broad wireless network designed for sensors, you know, how, how would you do it? . Like, it, it felt clear to us that cellular wasn't going to be the right, uh, solution for things like tracking devices and environmental monitors and things like that. And so we set about trying to build kind of like people have called it an overlay network. I like to think of it as, as more like an alternative network to cellular for small things. Right? Like that's kind of the easiest way to think about it. Um, Bluetooth wouldn't really work for this wifi wouldn't work for it, you know? So we always. Had the intention of like, how do we build something very specifically for these kinds of devices? Um, we had a bunch of friends at the time building startups that needed that kind of connectivity. That was really the thrust of, of why we did any of this. And we, you know, we took a bunch of different turns and iterations of trying to do it in, I don't know what you would describe it as, the web two way, perhaps, right? Where we would spend a bunch of money and we would build the network ourselves. Um, and somewhere along the line, like we just kind of realized that we're we're just like a poor version of AT&T or something. Like we were trying to do, we're trying to do things the same way that AT&T would do it or an existing carrier would do it, except we, we don't have any money, relatively. And so it, it wasn't really until 2017, I, I think, that we started to pay attention to crypto in a more serious way.Like embarrassingly, like I had just kind of ignored Bitcoin and Ethereum completely up until that time. Like, blockchain just kind of seemed like a buzzword, uh, that didn't make a lot of sense to me. I read the, the like Mastering Bitcoin book and my mind was kind of blown. Uh, and then I, you know, read the File Coin white paper, I think was the first time that we had seen. Kind of a proof of, of work model that like applied to a real thing, you know, it wasn't just, it wasn't just hashing and it wasn't, you know, just some kind of arbitrary use of compute power. It was actually like in file coin's case, if I can prove that I'm making file storage space available, then I'll, I'll get rewarded for that.And so that was a big thrust for us to like, think about doing things in a different way, was like, okay, here's a model for how you might build a wireless network based on a crypto economic model. Um, and do it in a completely different kind of throw the traditional model on its head or turn it on its head. And that was really the start. Uh, we started building in 20 17, 2018, uh, and launched in 2019. Went from being very small, with 150, you know, deployed devices to close to a million now after, after only three years. So a lot happened in that three years, but that's kind of roughly the, the story of, of how we got to where we wanna be.Austin: Yeah. So one of the things I really love about that story is it really tracks with, um, on a, on a much larger level, my own journey into blockchain, which is that, um, the utility reason was the reason that I actually first got into the space, which was I was working for a company and they thought the only way they could solve the problem was to build something on blockchain. And it, you know, seems very similar to sort of the way you guys examined a lot of different solutions and decided that that community ownership model is best expressed through, through blockchain. Um, so I think that's a really kind of interesting story. And one of the pieces I really like, I just find funny is I actually joined the Helium community far before I joined the Solana community. Um, I got, I got targeted with one of your ads back in the early days and actually bought, um, a few hotspots in, I think I actually, uh, I got in the discord and argued with Mark for a while about how this thing didn't make any sense and how it shouldn't exist or whatever. And there was no, there was no liquid token. And then, uh, you know, really got kind of, you know, as much used as you can get red pilled by a telco, uh, project, um, you know, really brought into the, the idea that this is really something that has a real interesting application in the real world out of it. Amir: Yeah. I, I remember you in the community in the early days. I mean, it was difficult at the start, right? Like, especially as a US based company, like, you've gotta be so careful from a regulatory point of view. And, and so I think some of the things that you kind of wanted to say, you couldn't say, and so, you're trying to explain what this was, I think was a little bit of a challenge, right? It's like, "buy this box and stick it in your window and earn this token." And that was kind of where we stopped. Right? Like we didn't, we didn't say anything more about, you know, what, what happens with the token after that, or, or what you could do with it and whether there would ever be a market for it. And, you know, we've been very careful to kind of stay away from all of that. But yeah, it grew like, like wildfire at some point. Like I, I remember at the start, it was very, very difficult to sell hotspots for like 500 bucks. And, you know, we were running a lot of ads are the ones that targeted you. Um, you know, we were giving away like pies and like doing promos for Valentine's day, you know, just said like, whatever scheme you could come up with to like try and get these things out the door, we were, we were doing it. And then at some point he just got its own momentum. And I remember taking, it took off from like 20 or 30,000 hotspots to hundreds of thousands. In what felt like no time. Austin: It's funny. I, I remember the pie. I, I couldn't remember, but I remember I was like, oh yeah, like you guys mailed me a pecan pie. I think for, cause I bought one around Thanksgiving.Amir: Yeah. We had pies, we had cookies, literally anything we could think of that would like motivate people to buy the box was what we were doing at the start. And then, you know, you had COVID supply shortage stuff happened and it, it went from like, we're trying to give these things away to like the demand for them was insane and they were selling on eBay for like 10 grand in the used market. So yeah, it definitely been, been crazy to, to watch and a hell of a journey. Austin: Yeah. So one of the things that, uh, I've always found fascinating about helium is that both the growth model and the economic model are very different than any other blockchain out there. The primary function of a network like Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana is to be a software platform and to run well. Bitcoin's not a smart software platform in the same way, but Bitcoin is a scarce amount of supply. Ethereum and Solana are smart contract platforms that are designed for other people to build applications and services on top of. You know, apart from the fact that the helium blockchain will we'll get into a lot of the limitations of the existing L 1 right now, but the modeling is, is very different than what you'd see in any other network, because you are both rewarded for providing availability and then also of specific geographic coverage range and proving that you own, you can provide service within that range, and then also passing data through it. And this is one of the things that it took me a while to wrap my head around is like the real value here is on how do you reward the network infrastructure for simply existing and then creating an economic system to meter expenditures on pretty much anything that can be modeled economically as a flow system?Amir: That was the learning really from looking at something like File Coin, right? Like that they had figured the same thing out, which was that if we can bootstrap the network by rewarding people for making file storage space available, then you can start the flywheel that way, right? I mean, arguably Bitcoin works this way, right? Like, they are delivering block rewards to miners for mining blocks, regardless of whether there are any transactions or like meaningful fees inside those blocks and it's the same, you know, the same kind of flywheel there in the sense, right? You have to sort of create the network first, um, before it can be taken advantage of, and in the case of a wireless network, that's particularly challenging, right? Because there's a threshold that you have to cross before someone really takes the network seriously. And, and by someone, I mean like a user of the network, right? Like a, a UPS or something that's looking to build like a logistics solution can't really consider doing it on a network like Helium until Helium is large enough and the coverage is ubiquitous enough that it works in most places. You've really got a very, very like difficult ramp at the start. And that's where I think this economic model has been the most powerful, right? The biggest innovation I think we came up with was proof of coverage, where we devised this scheme where hotspots, which are the equivalent of miniature cell towers basically, um, would transmit encrypted packets over the air and other hotspots would receive them, um, and that was kind of the proof, right? Like, are you where you say you are, are you signing things with the right private key? Uh, and that was the reward that's sort of like the Bitcoin mining reward equivalent, right? If you can prove that you are available to move traffic, then you're gonna get some reward for that. And then you're also gonna get more reward if you actually move traffic. And again, if I were to like, continue the Bitcoin analogy, the miners also get transaction fees for whatever transactions are in their blocks. And it's, it's, you know, similar kind of bootstrapping. I think, you know, that's one of the most powerful effects of, of crypto and, and one of the most interesting parts of, of using these crypto economic models is that you really get to bootstrap these networks in this completely different way.I think when people have tried to build these community wireless networks in the past, it's been this kind of tit for tat model, right? Where you share your wifi network and you can use mine. Um, but that's just not that interesting, right? Like I want, I want to make money somewhere. I, I want to be a telco operator or I want to be an Airbnb host or I want to be a cab driver in the Uber model, you know, those were the sort of breakthroughs economically. And so I think crypto is a way of just sort of decentralizing and democratizing that same, that same effect. Austin: Yeah. It's interesting. Cuz with the File Coin analogy, you have a similar idea of a resource flow system where you reward both for availability and then for actual storage or in this case passing data. But you guys added, I mean, I'd say two quite difficult components to that. The first is, uh, you know, File Coin operates primarily in consolidated data centers, right? There's not many people running File Coin nodes at home because the economics are such that you really need large amounts of storage availability for that network. But there are penalizations on the Helium network. The rewards you get in New York city, uh, because it's so crowded are, are lower than the rewards you might get in like a, you know, a less dense urban environment. Um, so I think that's a really interesting component too, where you also have to account for overlapping coverage is incredibly desirable up to a certain point. At which point, then it becomes detrimental and you can't simply reward that system. So it's a, it's a much harder system to model than simply data availability where like, you know, an infinite number of replicas is infinitely desirable. There's obviously a diminishing utility there, but for here it's really, um, it's really different. So it's interesting. Amir: Yeah. It's, it's both difficult to, to model economically, but also challe…
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