Block 24: The People’s Network Live in China, 150K+ Hotspots Ordered, & Staking Coming Soon!

Published in

The Helium Blog

5 min readApr 9, 2021

Over the course of the past month, immense progress has been made expanding upon The People’s Network coverage, creating new applications and use cases, and raising awareness of the Network across the globe. In this Newsletter, we’ll go over all of the latest updates in the Helium ecosystem.

🌎 26K+ Hotspots on The People’s Network

👥 28K+ Helium Discord Members

🚧 Validators Testnet in Preparation for $HNT Staking

📱 Helium Hotspot App v3 Updates

🔓 Helium Console Open-Sourced

🗺️ Helium Console Regional Support Announced for Australia and Asia

🧭 Helium Mappers Site Overhaul

✉️ Helium Mappers Newsletter Launched

🆕 Users Nexmachina, Victor®, and Southern Connecticut State University

🔗 Integration Partner TagoIO and Streamr Data Monetization

📺 The Uplink, Helium Community Call, and Helium Hacks Happy Hour

🇨🇳 Bobcat Miner 300s Lighting Up China

China Lit Up on The People’s Network!

In March, Bobcat shipped their first 2,000 Bobcat Miner 300s to China, pushing the Network past 25,000 Hotspots across the world. Check out this before and after shot from Helium Explorer, taken less than a week apart.

150K Third-Party Hotspots on Order

With more third-party Makers approved by the community and Hotspots that mine $HNT available, The People’s Network is growing faster than ever before 🚀. There are now a total of over 150K Hotspots on order to help contribute to Network growth across the globe. See Hotspot options here.

Staking is Coming!

Thank you to everyone in the community who has been integral in testing Validators on the Testnet 🙏. Anyone can get involved in the Testnet before Mainnet launches and Validator nodes start performing the work of the consensus group, including verifying transactions and adding new blocks to the blockchain. Learn more.

Third-Party Makers & City Leaderboard on Explorer 🔥

Have you seen the new Helium Explorer features? See Data Credits, Hotspots Added, and Locations Asserted for Helium and the third-party Makers on the “Hotspots” page, and see where your city stands with a new leaderboard. Check it out.

Helium Mappers Site Overhaul 🗺️

Some new updates were made, drastically changing the Helium Mappers interface. Try it out.

⛰️ Satellite imagery indicates high altitude and forest regions.

📶 1-color RSSI mapping for ‘low’ and ‘high’ signal strength areas.

🛣️ Road detailing provided for navigating and mapping at the same time.

Console Open-Sourced 🔓

In March, we announced Helium Console was open-sourced. This is a major milestone, moving The People’s Network toward accelerated usage and full decentralization by allowing anyone to host a version of Console. Read the announcement by Dal Gemmell.

New Integration Partner

TagoIO is the latest partner to integrate with Console. TagoIO is an advanced IoT cloud platform that allows users to easily integrate sensor data into real-time dashboards and data analytics services. Learn more.

Last Day of DeWi Batch 1 Grant Applications 📡

It’s the final day to submit an application for Batch 1 of the Decentralized Wireless Alliance Grant Program ⏰. 1,000,000 $HNT is available for 2021 grant recipients. Submit your application by today, Friday 4/9 at 11:59pm PT. Read the DeWi Grant Page. See the program announcement.

Southern Connecticut State University is the first university to join The People’s Network! SCSU will be deploying Hotspots and IoT solutions to empower students and assist the local community. An A+ new user 📚.

We recently announced a partnership with Victor®, the world’s largest manufacturer of rodent-control traps, to bring you a better mousetrap powered by The People’s Network 🪤! Say goodbye to manually monitoring traps. Read more.

We’re thrilled to announce Nexmachina joins The People’s Network from Spain 🇪🇸! Learn how the company is deploying coverage at scale with Wiongo and driving usage with the launch of their compatible NexCO2 devices. Read more.

Users of The People’s Network can now connect, deliver, and monetize IoT data via Streamr. Through this integration, users will have a fully decentralized and trustless global IoT data pipeline. Read more.

The Uplink with KST and Losant

In this episode of The Uplink, learn about building IoT solutions utilizing the growing LoRaWAN ecosystem featuring Helium, KS Technologies, and Losant! Watch here.

Helium Validator Testnet Staking Tutorial

@jcarl from the Helium Discord community gives a full overview of how to set up a Helium Validator for the Staking Testnet. Watch here.

Helium Hacks Happy Hour

Diana Rodriguez (@cotufa82) presents her WisBlock solution to improve diabetes monitoring on #ThePeoplesNetwork. Watch here.

Logan Allec Interviews Helium’s Mark Phillips

What is Helium, what companies use The People’s Network, and how can anyone get involved (including your grandma 🧓)? Logan Allec interviews VP of Business Development at Helium, Mark Phillips, on this and more. Watch here.