The People’s Network: The First 30 Days

It’s been quite a ride since we launched just over four weeks ago! Firstly, the Helium team and I are deeply thankful for everyone who has participated in The People’s Network. Getting in on the ground floor of an early movement like this requires conviction, and we appreciate the confidence in joining us.

I wanted to provide an overview of how the launch went, and a view into what’s next.

The Launch

We kicked off the network with a launch party in Austin. It was great to see network participants and chat with them about the network and what they wanted to see out of it. I always learn a great deal from talking with users and customers, and this was no exception. It was amazing to see the excitement and ideas for what could be done with a truly open and permissionless wireless network.

Before August we started with zero Hotspots and at last count, there are over 200 Hotspots live on the network. The majority of these are in Austin, most of them campus downtown, but some reach as far as Georgetown and San Marcos. After just a few weeks we covered all of Austin! Imagine what we can do together in a year. There are also 50 or so in the Bay Area among Helium employees and family:

To everyone who came out to our launch event, thank you for taking the time to meet us. I hope that you’ll continue to share feedback and help us improve the network for everyone that follows in your footsteps.

For the most part, the launch went very well. Everyone got up and running with their Hotspots easily and started participating in mining in short order.

Important Network Updates

No new network launches perfectly, and we are no exception. Since launch, we’ve been carefully monitoring the network and thanks to your feedback the team has managed to quickly fix issues that you’ve identified.

To summarize: we streamlined the on-boarding experience so that Hotspots can be added to the network faster; we pushed a series of updates to help Hotspots reflect their status more accurately; we developed a fix to help Hotspots play nice with local firewalls on protected networks; and lastly, we optimized the app so that generation six iPhones and older Android devices can set up Hotspots faster.

Changes to the Token Supply

Initially, we designed the network to distribute approximately 50,000 Helium tokens every month, which meant about 34 tokens being distributed to Hotspot owners every election cycle (roughly 30 minutes, or 30 blocks).

It became clear very quickly that this was — just in terms of optics — not going to be enough. We received a lot of feedback about this in a relatively short period of time. We heard that people are conditioned to deal in whole units rather than fractions, and would rather earn 1 Helium than 0.01 Helium for their mining efforts. As a result, we decided to change the distribution to 5,000,000 Helium per month on August 4th, 2019. The percentage distributions to Hotspot hosts is unchanged, and more about how that distribution works can be read here.

This change was analogous to a 100:1 stock split. However, it only applies on a go-forward basis from August 4th.

What’s Next

We’re proud of the launch, but there’s a lot of work we’re focused on in the short term to continue to improve and grow the network:

• Web-based block explorer and network visualizer: We’ve been working on this desktop tool in parallel to the mobile app for a while now, and plan to release it soon. This tool will allow a user to see the same block explorer, challenges, and network coverage on a desktop browser as displayed on the mobile app. We’ll continue to improve the mobile app, and upcoming updates include a network summary showing total Helium circulation, average block times, consensus groups explorer (which displays historical and current consensus groups and their members), and more.
• LongFi specification and Helium Developer Kits: We plan to release the LongFi specification in September, and the developer kits in October. This combination will allow people outside of Helium Inc to easily build devices that use the network. We believe strongly in providing good tools for developers of all types in order to make it as simple as possible to build everything from prototypes to production-ready products. We’re excited to see what people start building once we give them the tools to do it. To join Helium for Developers and gain early access to resources sign up here.
• Open sourcing the network: We are on track to open source all the network code in October. This will allow anyone interested to run their own blockchain node (separately from a Hotspot), build their own Hotspot, and submit feedback and improvements on our work. We’re very excited to get to this point. We intentionally deployed the network in Austin as soon as we could — even before we were ready to open-source the software, hardware, and wireless specifications — so that all of you can start mining Helium, and so that we can monitor and address network issues in a production setting.
• Data credits. Data Credits (DC) are needed by LongFi-end devices to pay Hotspot hosts for sending and receiving data on the Helium network. Before Data Credits can be activated, the network has to have a mechanism to discover the market price of Helium tokens in order to know how many DC to create when Helium is burned. This is typically called an “oracle problem,” and we have a variety of methods that have been proposed for how best to solve this. There are significant trade-offs with each method, but plan to implement later this year. In the meantime, LongFi devices can send and receive data for free and Hotspot hosts earn a larger chunk of the mining rewards until DC are active.
• Improvements to Proof-of-Coverage. We’ve learned a great deal from analyzing how PoC has been working in the wild and have come up with many desired improvements to how it works. This includes everything from how efficiently the paths are calculated and subsequently validated, to ensuring that the same location can’t be included in the same path multiple times. We’ll document and explain these changes in our public documents soon.

Help Grow the Network

The rest of the country gets to join in the fun in October when they receive their Hotspot shipments. We have another batch of Hotspots now on sale for November delivery.

While we’re excited about the results for our initial launch we need your help to continue the momentum and keep growing the network. The larger the network, the more valuable it becomes. Don’t forget about our referral program for your friends and family, they get $50 off each Hotspot, and for every five referrals, you receive a free Hotspot.

We’ll also be launching in Europe early next year and setting up a base of operations in Berlin.

We couldn’t be more excited about having launched the network and what comes next. Thank you again for joining us on this adventure!

Onwards 🚀

Amir