Helium is typically heralded as one of the most important success tales within the Web3 house, even touchdown a coveted article in The New York Times earlier this 12 months. Since 2019, the decentralized wi-fi network service, which payments itself as a peer-to-peer network for the Internet of Things, has touted rideshare company Lime as one of its marquee purchasers, claiming the company makes use of its service to geolocate rentable escooters. There are quite a few mentions of this partnership on its web site, together with the presence of Lime’s company brand, and in press protection with varied information shops.
There’s simply one drawback: That partnership by no means actually existed.
“Beyond an initial test of its product in 2019, Lime has not had, and does not currently have, a relationship with Helium.” Lime senior director for company communications Russell Murphy stated to Mashable.
According to Murphy, there was a “brief test of [Helium’s] product that didn’t last beyond a month or two” in the summertime of 2019. There has been no contact between Helium and Lime since then. Details surrounding what the check really entailed are unclear, as Helium’s major contact at Lime left the company greater than two and a half years in the past. However, Murphy says that, as a situation of the trial, Lime had requested that its title not be utilized by Helium in promotional materials.
Lime is listed as an lively shopper on Helium’s web site.
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
On Helium’s web site, Lime is featured prominently, alongside Salesforce, as one of the biggest corporations that makes use of Helium’s service, and definitely the biggest within the IoT house. Beyond merely stating its service “is used by” Lime, Helium additionally boasts that it is “trusted by” Lime on its “Enterprise” webpage. In a submit on Twitter from May 2021, Helium mentions the way it is “trusted by users” and, once more, consists of Lime’s brand on a listing of its prospects — however curiously omits immediately tagging Lime’s Twitter account.
Despite the omnipresence of this supposed partnership, executives at Lime, who had been conscious of this misrepresentation, had declined to take motion, authorized or in any other case.
“Helium has been making this claim for years and it is a false claim,” Murphy stated.
Now, nevertheless, Mashable has discovered that Lime is making ready to ship a stop and desist to Helium over its use of Lime’s title and brand on its web site, and in its advertising and marketing.
A tweet from 2021 listed Lime as a shopper of Helium.
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
Founded in 2013 by CEO Amir Harleem and Napster’s Shawn Fanning, Helium has dubbed itself “The People’s Network.” Ostensibly, Helium is hoping to construct a network for Internet of Things units — mainly something that requires connectivity to the web, resembling sensible fridges or the Ring doorbell — in locations with shoddy or non-existent WiFi, or 5G protection. Helium’s decentralized mannequin requires it to develop connectivity via a number of impartial units, fairly than depend upon a centralized infrastructure.
How does Helium do that? By promoting hotspot units, priced as a lot as $500 every, to budding traders and hopeful entrepreneurs. The hotspots additionally act as crypto mining {hardware} and reward the house owners of these units with Helium’s $HNT token, which it launched in July 2019, when a person accesses Helium’s network by way of their hotspot machine. $HNT is at the moment valued at roughly $9.
As of mid-2022, Helium’s wi-fi network seems to have very few precise prospects. Instead, the overwhelming majority of Helium’s income comes from people that buy the company’s hotspot units in hopes that they’ll earn cryptocurrency when companies, like Lime, make the most of the network service. Helium has used Lime’s picture to show the network has main purchasers. But, Lime does not use the service.
Lime’s scooters can be found in almost 250 cities all over the world. And, in accordance with Lime spokesperson Murphy, the company has now logged greater than 300 million rides on its scooters.
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Helium has been written about extensively by cryptocurrency-centric shops, like Coindesk, however has additionally obtained mentions in mainstream press shops, resembling Axios. Most not too long ago, in February 2022, Helium and its COO Frank Mong had been the topic of a glowing profile in The New York Times by tech columnist Kevin Roose titled “Maybe There’s a Use for Crypto After All.”
Lime was the primary of two corporations named within the Times article for instance of Helium’s biggest purchasers.
“Anyone can use the Helium network, although most of its users so far are companies like Lime (which has used Helium to keep tabs on its connected scooters),” wrote Roose. “It’s a real product used by real people and companies every day.”
According to Lime, The New York Times did not attain out to the company to substantiate the partnership. Mashable tried to substantiate this however the Times stated it does not talk about sourcing. Since the article’s publication, Helium has continued to put it on the market extensively. Helium CEO Amir Haleem has even pinned a Feb. tweet in regards to the piece to the highest of his Twitter profile.
These claims a few supposed Lime partnership are made even extra attention-grabbing by an August 2020 video webinar interview, uploaded to Helium’s YouTube channel, with Lime’s former central operations supervisor Eddie Li.
In the video, host Oliver Bruce of the Micromobility Podcast asks Li if Lime ever used Helium’s network.
“Did Lime ever end up adopting it and putting it out in any of their scooters?” asks Bruce.
“I don’t know now, but I think there was just a lot of projects going down,” explains former Lime worker Li. “After testing with Frank [Mong], there was definitely something that could have been there. But there’s just so much going on at that time…there was just a lot of things that did not come to fruition with Helium.”
COO Mong, who was one of the three individuals featured on the video podcast together with Bruce and Li, then chimes in. Mong recalled how Li had advised him in 2019, when Li was nonetheless working at Lime, how Helium’s monitoring machine would not work on Lime’s scooters.
“Dude that’s too big, we can’t use that on a scooter,” Mong recalled Li saying. Mong stated that by the point Helium was capable of get a tool sufficiently small for the scooter, Helium not had a contact at Lime as Li had exited the company.
Helium COO Frank Mong reveals simply how massive Helium’s monitoring machine was when Eddie Li (pictured: higher left), previously of Lime, determined to forgo attaching them to Lime’s escooters.
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
“We still hope we can get back in with Lime,” Mong stated within the Aug. 5, 2020 video. According to Lime spokesperson Murphy, Li has not labored at Lime for over two years. And, although the 2019 check fizzled, Lime stays a central half of Helium’s advertising and marketing to this present day.
“I believe [Li] was the only person who had any meaningful interaction with Helium,” stated Murphy.
In November 2019, on Helium’s official subreddit group on Reddit, Mong was questioned in regards to the Lime partnership by one other person within the discussion board.
“We have worked with Lime’s operations team in SF and we are in discussions to expand,” he replied. “They are a great group of folks! I’m guessing ‘corporate’ doesn’t know about us because a lot of our original sponsors are no longer at the company.”
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While Helium was based in 2013, its wi-fi network enterprise mannequin floundered till it launched the crypto-earning facet into the service. In July 2019, Helium would begin minting its $HNT token and roll out its plan to promote hotspots in return for cryptocurrency rewards. One month earlier, in Helium’s official weblog, CEO Haleem would first start mentioning a relationship with Lime. In one submit from June 2019, he particularly categorized Lime as a “partner.”
Helium CEO Amir Haleem reminisces a few testing section “before we started working with Lime” in an Oct. 2020 tweet.
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
More than a 12 months after that quick testing section in 2019, Helium’s CEO would, as soon as once more, submit a few relationship with Lime, this time on Twitter. In an Oct. 5, 2020 tweet, Haleem shared how Helium “acquired” Lime scooters off the road in Oakland, CA so as to equip them with the company’s GPS trackers.
“before we started working with @limebike we had to get creative,” Haleem tweeted, insinuating that the 2 corporations’ involvement, which by no means lasted past that preliminary trial, was nonetheless in existence greater than a 12 months later.
When reached for remark, a spokesperson for Nova Labs, Helium’s dad or mum company, offered Mashable with the next assertion:
“Nova Labs worked with Lime operations out of their San Francisco HQ. They trialed Lime scooters with the Helium Network using LoRaWAN tracking devices to find lost or stolen scooters, and were impressed with the accuracy of the sensors and vast coverage. Lime has since restructured and the team members we worked with are no longer employed there.”
Mashable additionally reached out to former Lime central operations supervisor Eddie Li for remark. We will replace this text after we hear again.
On its “Enterprise” webpage, Helium claims it is “trusted by” Lime.
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
In the Web3 house, Helium has been held up as a “unicorn,” a typical VC time period to explain a startup company with a worth of over $1 billion. The Web3 darling has raised greater than $364 million so far from enterprise capital giants resembling Andreessen Horowitz and Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Ventures at an over billion-dollar valuation.
Andreessen Horowitz known as Helium the “fastest growing wireless network ever” when it invested within the company final 12 months. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian via his VC agency, Seven Seven Six, is additionally an investor. In March, Helium rebranded its company title to “Nova Labs” so as to differentiate itself from the Helium network service that it runs.
While Helium boasts on its homepage about having bought almost one million hotspot crypto mining units to budding entrepreneurs, the precise individuals utilizing “The People’s Network” have but to materialize. A current profile from the tech publication The Generalist reported that Helium is solely making $6,500 a month from information use on its decentralized wi-fi network.
Earlier this week, Helium was thrust into the highlight after a Twitter thread criticizing the company’s enterprise mannequin by angel investor and Web3 skeptic, Liron Shapira, went viral. In the thread, Shapira makes the case that its $6,500 a month revenue reveals that there is no buyer base for Helium’s wi-fi service. Instead, Shapira argues, the company’s revenue mannequin is really primarily based round promoting the hotspots to speculators who’re attempting to earn cryptocurrency, thus placing Helium’s enterprise rather more consistent with a multi-level advertising and marketing, or pyramid, scheme.
In response to Shapira’s thread, Helium CEO Haleem and Helium investor Kyle Samani, a accomplice on the agency Multicoin Capital, confirmed the income particulars.
“The @helium network generates around $2M/mo in fees. most of this is in the form of Hotspot onboarding fees,” tweeted Haleem. He proceeded to substantiate the $6,500 per 30 days income generated by precise information use.
“I don’t dispute the numbers,” Samani replied.
Along with Helium’s points with getting prospects for its wi-fi network, Helium’s token — the reward for its hotspot house owners — has taken successful over the previous few months. $HNT has now dropped roughly 83 p.c from its earlier excessive of slightly below $53 in Nov. 2021. On Helium’s subreddit, hotspot house owners have complained about earnings dropping to as little as $0.10 a month.
“My city is just too overloaded with miners. I make about 0.03$ a day,” one person complained.
“I get like .10 a month so I unplugged that piece of crap,” one hotspot proprietor stated.
In order for these investing within the hotspot units that Helium sells to revenue, Helium wants purchasers to actively use its wi-fi service. Having a high-profile listing of purchasers would doubtless entice these searching for a enterprise alternative to spend money on. Though, having a high-profile listing of company purchasers repeatedly utilizing Helium’s service would doubtless lead to information prices amounting to greater than $6,500 a month.
The Web3 wi-fi network as soon as marketed Nestlé on its web site because it stated the company’s ReadyRefresh water supply service utilized Helium. However, Nestlé tells Mashable that it bought off the service together with its regional spring water manufacturers final 12 months. Helium has since eliminated Nestlé’s brand from its web site. Salesforce, a company at the moment featured on Helium’s homepage, did not reply to an inquiry from Mashable about its use of Helium.
Helium additionally prominently options an Oct. 2021 press launch a few partnership with DISH on its web site homepage. When tech outlet PCMag (owned by Mashable’s writer, Ziff Davis) reached out to DISH, the company’s consultant confirmed a partnership however appeared confused as to what it really entailed. DISH additionally did not reply to an e-mail from Mashable about Helium.
However, it seems that it was clear even to many of Helium’s hotspot prospects that Lime was promoted as one of its most outstanding purchasers.
“Other than Lime, what other companies use the Network?,” requested one Reddit person, who had simply invested in a Helium mining machine, within the company’s official subreddit in May 2020.
“We have a bunch of announcements coming,” replied Helium COO Mong. “New customers, new partnerships, and more! Thanks for your patience. Please sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Twitter @helium and @fmong for breaking news.”
However, Mong failed to say one vital element: Lime wasn’t and nonetheless is not a shopper.
UPDATE: Jul. 29, 2022, 2:11 p.m. EDT This article has been up to date with an announcement from Helium’s dad or mum company, Nova Labs.
