Helium has revenues of $6.5k/month after $365M investment from A16Z

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"

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

> Helium’s economy looks moderate or small, depending on how you parse the numbers. According to Token Terminal, Helium’s revenue in June totaled $2.6 million. That’s down from the April high of $5.5 million but a 73% improvement over the same period a year earlier. In 2020, Helium’s June revenue was below $200,000. Eddy Lazzarin, the head of protocol design at a16z, noted that when his firm first invested in Helium, “the last ninety days had something like $600.” It has come a long way since then.

> However, this is only part of the picture. Data Credits are used when onboarding a hotspot, asserting a location, and processing a payment. Onboarding hotspots, in particular, is intensive from a Data Credit perspective. Since Helium is onboarding so many new hotspots, this skews results, suggesting greater customer activity than is actually present. Data from The Decentralized Wireless Alliance removes these three uses, demonstrating the size of the Helium economy’s customer demand. By this measure, DC usage was just $6,561 in June.

https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/helium

The older protocols that were built in the depth of 2018-19 bear markets will survive. Many of them are also doing wonderfully well in terms of revenue. COMP, MKR, AAVE, CRV all make a ton in revenue and have a well-defined product-market fit.

Crypto projects are tough to value. Their sheer global scale means that they can ramp up revenue and even profits extremely fast. StepN, a move-to-earn app reportedly made $120M in profit in its first year of operation. That might not be sustainable, but what business wouldn't give an arm and a leg to make $120M profits in just one year of operation?

Imo, crypto projects should be valued on 2-3x multiples at max.

LoRaWAN generally can use less energy than cellular networks, running off batteries for e.g. 7 years, where cellular would run out within 1-2. This is somewhat mitigated by NB-IoT, which was not available in most markets just two years ago. International LoRaWAN providers such as TheThingsIndustries and Helium can have advantages if you have a low, low data transmission interval and don't care about the (supposed) guarantees a traditional mobile carrier SLA would give you.

On the other hand, since neither Helium not The Things Industries owns their gateways (run by the community) and operates in an unlicensed spectrum (much less likely to discover and fine those who disrupt communications due to negligence or even on purpose), one might opt to simply use TTN (even less promises on network quality than TheThingsIndustries) or NB-IoT.

There are great use-cases for LoRaWAN, though Helium comes with more drawbacks than advantages for most.

web3 is going to thrive whether you like it or not. Primarily because of three reasons:

- Greed. Its absurdly easy to make a ton of money very fast in crypto. As long as that's possible, money will keep pouring into the system.

- Gambling. The global gambling industry is half a trillion every year. Even if you think crypto has no fundamentals and is akin to gambling, it still represents a massive market. Opening a 50x long on a random shitcoin might be the same as yoloing in $10,000 at the roulette table. If the latter can happen sustainably, the former can as well.

- Principles. Crypto/web3/blockchain - whatever you might call it - will continue to attract people at the edge cases simply because of the principles and narratives behind it. Self-sovreignity, privacy, ownership - these are ideas worth pursuing.

If "web2" hadn't shut off its own users from any semblance of ownership in the platforms, or had done more for privacy, web3 would have died in 2017. But because they didn't, web3 will continue to find users simply because of the "privacy + self-ownership" narrative.

More than anything else, I see the massive amounts of money flowing into web3 as a failure of the web2 platforms. If Facebook wasn't such a scummy company, and if Google wasn't tracking everything I do so maliciously, I would have completely ignored web3 as an idea.