Look into SoRare’s volume. They raised over $500m. Volume is now lower than it was way back in 2020.<p>The crypto down rounds are going to be hilarious.<p>Note to investors: if you’re investing in crypto projects, carefully consider the ponzinomics and the vesting schedule. You want your unlocks to happen in the middle of the bullrun when exit liquidity is ample.<p>And also remember that whatever you might think of as “normal”
volume will crash 90%. And when you think it has stabilized, it will crash 90% more.<p>The number of investors who bought the top is hilarious. But then, this is also a field where risk management is treated like a sin.
Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies.<p>And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node.<p>The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money.<p>The <i>problem</i> is that you need the entire network in place before people can build on it. So they have been subsidizing the miners. And it's a race of how much money can you raise and payout vs how much is a network like that is worth.<p>And right now everybody has cellular and cable and fiber and no one really <i>needs</i> another system. Most of the use cases (LOTS of sensor data) aren't really worth that much money.<p>Personally, I think the government should subsidize something like this to allow it to get off the ground. Earthquake data, climate data, traffic data, etc. Essentially public use.
I looked into getting a Helium hotspot, but when I looked at my ISP‘s terms of service, the Helium use case is explicitly forbidden (I use Frontier Internet in Florida.)<p>If you’re not familiar with it, what a Helium hotspot does is allow compatible IOT devices to share your Internet connection.<p>I suspect that allowing random third parties to use your Internet connection it’s explicitly forbidden by the terms of service of most ISPs, especially when you are being monetarily compensated/rewarded for such sharing.<p>Excerpt from ToS:
“Customers may not retransmit the Service or make the Service available to anyone outside the
premises (i.e. Wi-Fi or other methods of networking).”
Reposting an analysis I did 6 months ago, where their numbers did not make any sense to me compared to any other LoRaWAN deployment; and probably impossible - bound by physics - to ever generate enough revenue to pay their gateway operators at their data cost / gateway rewards: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29944979" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29944979</a>
This thread lacks factual information : no source for the $6.5k/month revenue, and no source for the LoRaWAN market analysis supposedly demonstrating it is a "fake, overblown use case"<p>Actually I would be interested in understanding better the choice made by Helium and the current and future use of LoRaWAN. When I first heard about Helium some years ago I wondered why they focused on this protocol compared to WiFi or cellular network technology. Which kind of devices are supposed to connect to Helium ? I suppose it is IoT devices, but most of them actually work perfectly fine with good old cellular networks
I bought ETH when it was $7 back in 2017 and participated in literally every single investment I could until about 2019, resulting in 7 figure returns.<p>I wouldn't touch the stuff now.<p>The ability for regular people to invest in crypto back then made the ponzi-like architecture of it worth the risk.<p>Now the VCs are trying to push their agendas, and it's blatantly obvious it's vapor.
The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates. Cellular is a different story. There are already 3rd-party cellular towers operators who profitably provide data service to handsets on behalf of the big network providers. Tokenomics could work for cellular with carriers providing demand-side token consumption. However, cellular wasn't Helium's initial target, and watching them migrate to multi-band / multi-protocol has been a bit cringey.
I remember, after Loggly raised ~4.2M, our revenues hit $7,500 after about 4-6 months. At the time, I thought the effort to build what we had built, code-wise, could be done by 1-2 people in maybe a couple of years.<p>Marketing plays a big part in how much revenue comes in to a startup. The product also plays a big part, but if the product does what people need it to do, it becomes a marketing task to accelerate growth to justify the investments.<p>Startups are a balancing act, especially when there are multiple stakeholders involved. I'm not sure these crypto offerings offer anything "product wise" that is useful to getting things done, other than making more money.<p>Slight of hand models are tricky to evaluate.<p>With Helium, they need people providing Internet to other people. Helium's "offering" drops to being an exchange from the marketplace (which must be grown) to the user base (which must also be grown). This "burning the candle at both ends" approach requires many multiples of capital influx to achieve, and even then if the business model is not sound (we all already have Internet) it will fail.
Is the $6k/mo revenue from people using the Wi-Fi hotspots, like how someone might pay for an Xfinity hotspot if they aren’t a Comcast customer? Please forgive the ignorance.
<a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo</a><p>Relevant Silicon Valley clip.<p>I’ve really enjoyed watching the market reprice a lot of the names he drops as goals in that clip.
A16Z is obviously well known, but are they respected? I naïvely assumed that they would have access to enough expertise and deal flow to avoid the most absurd losers, but a few examples in the last few months have made me question that.<p>And an important follow up question: do they have enough dry powder to keep sustaining these things?
The passive income for hotspot owners prior to Aug, 2021 was very real, many cases thousands per month for a single hotspot. The HNT coin price was much higher also hitting near $50 creating this incredible hope of easy money and for the early players who could get a hotspot they banked. Then Helium halved the coin in Aug/21 and it's been a downward spiral of HNT prices and software updates. The people who made $$ were the hotspot hardware manufacturers at $400 a pop with a lead time of 8-12 months to get one when the hype really started in Mar, 2021. For most today buying a hotspot would take 6-8 months ROI, but HNT prices really dictate that.<p>So now with 900k hotspots installed Helium is pushing aside the lorawan network with less mining payouts in hopes/dreams people will flock to buying 5G cbrs implementations costing over $3k per site. Not sure what customers or applications will use this network, something helium still has to signup customers to create value. The network like 5G has range limitations, so you'll have to spend more to go further. If I recall amazon has a competitive cbrs product also. All I know is it's no simple plug/play.<p>Early adopters really made a lot of $$ with Helium but it's been decline since late last year. It's truly one of the simplest miners to deploy in 5 minutes, but to get value you need a good antenna setup. I'm sure the Helium creators have a huge stash of HNT coins and not really worried.
You can go to the Helium Explorer and look at nodes and their earnings directly: <a href="https://explorer.helium.com/" rel="nofollow">https://explorer.helium.com/</a><p>Zoom in, click a cell, click a node, click "30D" and you'll see the amount of HNT and how much that is worth at the current market rate. I didn't see any $6,500 nodes.
I've had a Linxdot hotspot running in my house for the last few days. Apparently it's earned me 0.08 HNT so far (about $0.70 USD.)<p>I've been thinking about building an IoT device for my mailbox, so I can get a notification when we get a letter. It could be fun to build something that uses the Helium network. Maybe solar powered, and using a weight sensor or something. (I probably don't need Helium for this but it would be fun to try it out.)
The conventional wisdom suggests that governments should not be in the business of 'picking winners' when it comes to subsidizing industries.<p>Private funds can do whatever they want I suppose, but I wonder if there's a term for VCs that spend government-scale funds on things that look like long-term losers. Crypto and 'web3' are just the latest examples of this, and they're coming after a decade of equally uninspiring ideas like social networks, food delivery, Uber, Airbnb and WeWork.
I will build you an $80k ARR business, I just need a $365mn down payment. If you want a business that loses $100mn a year, that will cost you a lot more - probably in the region of a $5bn down payment.
There is the basic use case of getting something like weather sensors broadcasting conditions over time. That could be useful. The way I think this will be used if it ever got market traction is to spy on you.<p>Today if I don't put my tv or my fridge on my home wifi, they can't call home unless they had a phone modem - I hope that doesn't make financial sense (I just realized I was hoping they only spy on you with wifi). I can put my own streaming device on the tv with a defined privacy policy. I don't want my tv showing me ads, and it doesn't, and that's one reason I'm using a 3rd party streaming device. Because I'm paying them there's a much higher chance it will only do what they say. If this ever got popular, your tv would have a direct connection to broadcast outside of your control what you are watching. I don't want devices doing more corporate surveillance things not in my control.
"On average, they spent $400-800 to buy a hotspot. They were expecting $100/month,". These expectations were soooo unrealistic! To have 100% return every 8 months is beyond crazy.
Soooo for every $4700 you get $1 ARR or if you assume that ARR is for 10 years not-discounted $470 for $1 ARR/10 years. I mean how much of those investment dollars came from early crypto investments in the first place (i.e. low cost) and are just gettin recycled is the real question.<p>I realize that's an unfair comparison but I think there are many many people who want to throw shade at crypto because a majority of it is rotten and has weighed down on the positive attributes.
Interesting - I had never heard of these guys before the most recent episode of the Planet Money podcast on NPR.<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-the-blockchain?t=1658816970206" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1113115868/little-house-on-th...</a>
Helium would be so cool if it wasn't crypto-based and used BT instead of LoRa, and was more focused on being local-first.<p>They're doing some pretty amazing stuff as is, but Sidewalk/Tile/AirTags/YoSmart are doing it without crypto, and with small enough bandwidth to work via mobile.<p>I'd much rather have a centralized but selfhostable system, where you choose what network(s) to be a part of, and payments or lack thereof is up to them. They'd have a real chance of building a very large network if they had hardware partners.<p>Ideally, this stuff should be "too cheap to meter" anyway, and could even be ad supported, at least for very low bandwidth best effort stuff.
Building a market for bandwidth as a commodity was the last major initiative that Enron started. Didn’t go well for them, and I can’t see this going well for Helium.
I may be one of the rare ones, but I'm late to the game, and am trying to set up a bunch of sensors. The biggest problem I have is that I can't get my sensors to work.<p>There is so much talk and focus on miners, but they need more cheap, easy to use, and functional sensors.
Every time the so-called web3 is mentioned on HN, it's immediately obvious what it is and why nobody should touch it, in spite of very vocal fans and people with vested interest. It's just another fad just like NFTs - with big hype and no real substance.
Helium is aggressively dropping LoraWAN for all of these reasons, by relegating it to a second class under 5g bands and other wireless protocols<p>Its negligent for an analysis to not mention that
Google had no revenue for years. But turned out to be one of the best investments of all time.<p>To figure out how they are doing, the first thing I would look at is a chart of Helium's usage growth.
In an era where movement of money is getting fast, the rich are getting richer by holder higher equity.<p>I find the concept of tokenization as a better way to redistribute equity.<p>I think about the tokens as money with superpowers which can act like equity , API keys and loyalty card too.<p>Think of tokens as a 100x version of managing equity table in a company.
Two ways to make a name for yourself these days:
* crypto
* talking sh*t about crypto<p>Crypto is at a low point right now. If you time it right, it's like reporting that investing in the stock market is bad after the '08 recession.
The technology and adaptation is definitely not ripe -- yet!<p>But assessing the success of a web3 product by the ability of selling a specific product is akin to assessing the success of a country by its ability to sell passports.<p>The cost to offset the operations should come from the activity in the economy it encompasses -- these should not be assessed as traditional companies.