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There are two major innovations in the crypto cycle. In real life, it’s ridiculous to distract retail, pumping the wrong narrative and ultimately destroying the market.
This cycle had a lot of innovation, but no one was actually stuck because Mimecoin appeared early and stole the show. However, if the recent momentum from projects like Helium is what advances, the current implementation could potentially gain more “serious” cycle innovation thanks to the distributed physical infrastructure network (Depin).
Depin uses Crypto’s incentives and public tuning to bootstrap real-world infrastructure (such as wireless coverage, sensor networks, GPU clusters, energy grids, etc.). Instead of billion-dollar telecom operators and centralized cloud platforms, infrastructure is built by the community and is in line with token rewards. In theory, it is the last Frankenstein on the Internet, turning cryptography into a tool that builds digital utilities into a meatspace outside.
In recent weeks, helium has hit a new all-time high with DAO voting participation, $ Mobile Balidator Onboarding and usage-based rewards. It also passed major protocol milestones. Expanding 5G coverage to over 4,500 radios in over 2,000 US cities, driving real-world traffic to Helium Mobile’s unlimited $20/month plan – currently available at 3,000 Walmart stores.
Take that in a bit: These are real phones using a crypto-assisted, community-driven Depin network.
Traditional communications are bloated, centralized and hostile to innovation. Infrastructure costs are terrible, rural services often do not exist, and MVNOs are locked into opaque backend transactions. Helium flips this by allowing users to deploy coverage infrastructure, earn rewards based on network demand, and manage protocol upgrades through the Onchain governance system. It’s basically cell-for-cell-towers (EW, I know. An analogy of such a chugi at this point). Instead of squeezing labor, however, we coordinate long-term incentives through verifiable coverage proof and Onchain Traffic accounting.
That said, it’s far from a completed transaction for helium. Protocol’s parent company, Nova Labs, was important Layoff round Last summer, and now there’s competition XNET likes. It is still unclear how profitable the Helium Mobile business is.
First launched for low-data IoT sensors (Lorawan), helium’s pivot into 5G mobile was a major step towards legitimacy. In exchange A partnership with T-Mobile, Helium Mobile now serves as a hybrid carrier, routes data both through centralized infrastructure and community-run equipment. This allows for fresh experiments with real-time tracking of coverage-based rewards, user-side rebates, and infrastructure use. All of these settle in Solana.
Helium is not alone. In recent months, projects like Hivemapper (Distributed Street View), WeatherXM (Community Weather Data), and Grass (AI Model browser-based data capture) have each demonstrated early traction. The common thread here is actual participation, mainly thanks to tokenized incentives. These are applications that may exist without ciphers, but with that they are better scaling. People who like financial rewards, that’s what they end up.
You might think that any of these networks will stimulate the first depin-native flywheel if the right utility hits a turning point where token yield pleasure and balance.
