In recent weeks, Helium has hit new all-time highs in DAO voting participation, $MOBILE validator onboarding and usage-based rewards. It’s also passed major protocol milestones: expanding 5G coverage to over 4,500 radios across 2,000+ US cities and driving real-world traffic to Helium Mobile’s $20/month unlimited plan — now sold in 3,000 Walmart stores.
DePIN uses crypto incentives and public coordination to bootstrap real-world infrastructure (like wireless coverage, sensor networks, GPU clusters, energy grids). Instead of billion-dollar telcos or centralized cloud platforms, the infrastructure gets built by communities and aligned with token rewards.
Helium’s pivot to 5G mobile was a major step toward legitimacy. Through a partnership with T-Mobile, Helium Mobile now operates as a hybrid carrier, routing data through both centralized infrastructure and community-run equipment. This has enabled new experiments in coverage-based rewards, user discounts, and real-time infrastructure usage tracking — all of which are settled on Solana.
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