The Helium IoT Network

I came to Helium the way I come to most things: sideways. I was reading about LoRa mesh networks, which led me to LoRaWAN, which led me to the question of who actually operates public LoRaWAN infrastructure and why. The answer, in a lot of cities, turns out to be a combination of community enthusiasts and people who bought a small radio device because someone on the internet told them it would earn them passive income in cryptocurrency.

What it actually is

The Helium IoT network is a decentralised LoRaWAN network. Instead of a telco building and operating towers, individuals buy small gateway devices called hotspots, connect them to their home internet, and place them somewhere with decent line of sight. The hotspots provide LoRaWAN coverage. IoT sensors and devices in the vicinity, anything from a soil moisture sensor to a GPS tracker to a flood warning device, can use that coverage to transmit small packets of data over long distances with minimal power consumption.

In return for providing this coverage, hotspot operators earn HNT, the Helium network’s token. The mechanism for earning is called Proof of Coverage: hotspots regularly broadcast beacons over the air, and neighbouring hotspots that receive those beacons submit witness reports. The more witnesses, the more coverage is verified, and the more tokens flow to the participating hotspots.

The concept is genuinely clever. Rather than requiring a central operator to build out infrastructure before there are customers, Helium crowdsources the infrastructure itself. The network builds itself, financed by token rewards, and useful IoT connectivity emerges as a byproduct.

The arc of the thing

Helium launched in 2019 and went through a period of extraordinary hype. At peak, there were over 340,000 active hotspots worldwide. Early operators in well-placed locations earned meaningful amounts. The forums filled with stories of people covering their mortgage with hotspot earnings. Hardware sold out. Wait lists stretched to months.

Then the economics shifted. More hotspots meant more competition for the same reward pool. The token price fell. Before the Solana migration in April 2023, Helium had over 342,000 active hotspots. Since then, IoT hotspot growth has been considerably more modest. The get-rich-quick phase is definitively over.

What remains is more interesting than what was lost. For most IoT hotspot operators in early 2025, earnings sit in the £3 to £45 per month range, with many finding themselves at the lower end of that spectrum. That is not passive income that changes your life. It is, perhaps, a modest offset against the cost of providing infrastructure that is genuinely useful.

What it is genuinely good for

LoRaWAN as a technology is well suited to a specific class of problem: sensors and trackers that need to transmit small amounts of data infrequently, over long distances, on battery power that lasts years rather than days. GPS asset trackers. Environmental monitoring. Water level sensors. Soil conditions. Cold chain monitoring. Agricultural applications. Smart city infrastructure.

These applications do not need the bandwidth of 4G or WiFi. They do not need low latency. They need low power, long range, and affordable connectivity. LoRaWAN delivers all of these.

The Helium network provides LoRaWAN coverage that would otherwise require either a dedicated private gateway or a paid public network operator. For a developer building an IoT product, being able to reach an existing network that covers significant urban geography without deploying any infrastructure yourself is a real advantage. Hundreds of companies and thousands of developers are already building on the network.

The honest complications

The earnings picture is where the honest complications live. A single hotspot in an optimal location might earn 5-15 IOT tokens daily, while poorly positioned devices in oversaturated areas may earn less than 1 token per day. And token value fluctuates with the broader cryptocurrency market, meaning the calculation you make today may look entirely different in six months.

The Proof of Coverage mechanism rewards location and density in ways that are not always intuitive. Too isolated and there are no neighbours to witness your beacons. Too crowded and you are competing with many others for a limited witness pool. The optimal position is in an area with some existing coverage but room to add meaningful new coverage: not easy to know in advance, and changing as the network grows and contracts around you.

There is also the blockchain dimension, which puts some people off entirely and which I find myself neutral about. Helium migrated from its own Layer-1 blockchain to Solana in 2023. Tokens need to be held in a Solana wallet. Onboarding a hotspot costs a small fee in data credits. The network governance happens via Helium Improvement Proposals voted on by token holders. It is a meaningful layer of complexity on top of what could otherwise be a straightforward piece of radio infrastructure.

The comparison I keep making

I keep coming back to a comparison with MeshCore, which I have been thinking about separately. Both are decentralised radio networks. Both rely on individuals deploying hardware to build out coverage. Both create something useful in aggregate that no individual could create alone.

The differences are instructive. MeshCore is explicitly not a financial instrument. Nobody earns tokens for running a repeater. The incentive to deploy is the network itself: you benefit from the coverage you help create. Helium’s incentive structure brought rapid growth during the hype phase but also attracted people with no interest in LoRaWAN per se, only in token earnings. When the earnings fell, so did operator motivation and hotspot density.

The question of whether financial incentives make a network better or worse over time is genuinely interesting. Helium’s current IoT network, smaller and less hyped than its peak, may actually be healthier as a result: the operators who remain are more likely to be there for reasons beyond pure financial speculation.

Where I have landed

I came into this curious, and I leave it still curious but more measured. Helium IoT is a real network providing real LoRaWAN coverage. The underlying technology is sound. The use cases are legitimate. The community governance model is interesting.

As a way to earn meaningful passive income in 2026, it is not. The golden era is over and probably not coming back in the same form.

As a way to contribute to decentralised wireless infrastructure that does something useful, and recoup a modest fraction of the hardware cost over time while doing so, it is worth taking seriously. Particularly if you are already interested in LoRa for other reasons, already have a rooftop or elevated location with a good internet connection, and approach the token earnings as a bonus rather than a business case.