A spokesman for Lime said in an email that “beyond an initial test of its product in 2019, Lime has not had, and does not currently have, a relationship with Helium.”) 3, 2022: Months after this column was published, some of Helium’s partnerships came under scrutiny from crypto skeptics who claimed that the company was claiming affiliations with companies it had no official deals with. More than 500,000 Helium hot spots are in use around the world, with thousands being added to the network every day. These hot spots, which cost roughly $500 apiece and can reach 200 times farther than conventional Wi-Fi hot spots, share their owners’ bandwidth with nearby internet-connected devices - like parking meters, air-quality sensors or smart kitchen appliances.Īnyone can use the Helium network, although most of its users so far are companies like Lime (which has used Helium to keep tabs on its connected scooters) and the Victor mousetrap company (which uses it for a new line of internet-connected traps). The network is made up of devices called Helium hot spots, gadgets with antennas that can send small amounts of data over long distances using radio frequencies. On a basic level, Helium is a decentralized wireless network for “internet of things” devices, powered by cryptocurrency. And while it’s not the most attention-grabbing crypto project out there - no cartoon apes or copies of the Constitution are involved - trying it out has helped me understand how crypto can be quite useful in solving certain types of problems. Recently, though, I discovered one that does. But so far, not many crypto projects have had what I’d call “normie utility” - solving problems that exist for people outside the crypto world, that aren’t primarily about buying or selling digital assets and that would be impossible to solve with normal, non-crypto technology. There are plenty of crypto exchanges, NFT trading platforms and video games that involve buying and selling crypto tokens. It’s a tough question to answer, in part because most of the successful (and legal) uses of cryptocurrency so far have been in finance or finance-adjacent fields. One of the most frequent questions asked by crypto skeptics is: What can you actually do with crypto, besides financial speculation and crimes?
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May 2023
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