Beyond issues with its miners and token system, Helium appears to have a more pressing problem: The company seems to be struggling to generate revenue from its network. Forbes found that over the past year, between June 2021 and August 2022, just $92,000 in revenue was generated from data moving across the network, according to Helium’s own numbers — a figure that starkly contrasts the $250 million the parent company has raised from investors. Instead, Helium generates the vast majority of its revenue — $53.3 million during the same time period — from people registering their new hotspots and authenticating other devices on the network.
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The crypto landscape is “littered with the bones of projects that have basically fallen by the wayside because the ultimate promise is not being met by fundamental economics returns,” Monsur Hussain, head of Financial Institutions Research at Fitch Ratings, told Forbes. For Helium’s network to become profitable, Hussain added, “You’d actually need to have the whole earth covered in a few feet of these devices to potentially consume enough data.”