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

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

#31

Post by lordnacho »

ackbar03 wrote: post #14
pg_bot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of these web3 companies is going bust. They could all be built without tokens or a blockchain if they wanted to. There are only two things propping up the entire crypto economy, VC funding and fraud. Once the VC money leaves the ecosystem the dominoes will fall.

Yet some VCs are still plowing into web3. There was an article today about how Moellis was getting into Web3 companies. I'm genuinely curious what their thought process is. I tend to be in the camp that web3 is just a bunch of hot air seeing how cryptos been around for quite a while now with few use cases, but I also give benefit of the doubt there could be something there given the nature of tech.

Moelis advise on M&A though. They get fees from companies doing steps with each other, which they do in both good times and bad (aka restructuring). I didn't think it meant Moelis was investing in those companies.

It's like a lawyer getting into crypto, they do contracts for the companies, they're not buying tokens for themselves.

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

#32

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

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.

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

#33

Post by RL_Quine »

csdvrx wrote: post #21
beambot wrote: post #8

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 wa…

> The problem with Helium is that there's virtually no demand for LoRa protocol's super-low datarates yet. FTFY. Personally, I'd love to relay my home weather station readings over LoRa - then many other things too, if it's cheap enough! (say my TPMS - why not? Then I can retroactively track my car to cross correlate where I went shopping) Helium business model that's paying for the deployment of a worldwide network…

That makes no sense. LORAWAN is very, very limited by airtime, which is why the data rates are so abysmally low. You're never going to see a huge amount of traffic on it.

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

#34

Post by karamanolev »

1123581321 wrote: post #6

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.

Sorry to be blunt, these have nothing to do with Wi-Fi hotspots, they don't have the same use cases, they don't use the same protocol and it's as far removed from Xfinity and Comcast as possible.

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

#36

Post by KaiserPro »

beambot wrote: post #8

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 wa…

Where I am, Helium is would be the cheapest way to get data from a-b without draining batteries.

I can dump sensors anywhere in the city and they should just work.

But

When I last looked, it was really convoluted to buy data, you had to either buy them off a miner, which sounded dodgy, or mine the tokens yourself. I just wanted to buy $25 worth of data transfer and have done with it, but I couldn't figure out a way to do it at the time

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

#37

Post by pavlov »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #26
pg_bot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single one of these web3 companies is going bust. They could all be built without tokens or a blockchain if they wanted to. There are only two things propping up the entire crypto economy, VC funding and fraud. Once the VC money leaves the ecosystem the dominoes will fall.

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 $120…

> “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?”

Shady securities in the past offered that kind of short-term unsustainable returns too. That’s why it was heavily regulated. This iteration of the same concept should be as well. It’s good news that SEC is now inspecting all of Coinbase’s listings as potential security offerings — better late than never.

Nobody wants to use these move-to-earn, play-to-earn and whatever-else token flywheels if there isn’t a market attached where you can dump the tokens. And those markets aren’t attractive unless the tokens are essentially securities.

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

#38

Post by KaiserPro »

tradertef wrote: post #10
Canada wrote: post #2

Helium is a terrible use case for cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is for money, only for money, and not for any other purpose.

Agree. The amount of spectrum they use for their application is so small (15 MHz?) that there is really no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi. Helium is just a toy project with good marketing. It is really a scam.

> no good use-case that can not be addressed by cellular or Wi-Fi.

Cellular is power hungry, and Wi-fi is range limited.

Long range low bandwidth, that is both cheap in power and money to use, is really useful.

Cellular is a pain in the arse, expensive to miniaturise, difficult to power longterm.

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

#39

Post by Ekaros »

thunfischbrot wrote: post #28
ddrdrck_ wrote: post #22

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…

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) gu…

IoT is a real market. But I have no idea why anyone investing in probably rather big of a system wouldn't pick a reliable proven partner with support and guarantees that they can actually make it work.
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