The Ones to Watch series covers RWA-adjacent projects doing something genuinely different — tokenization use cases that don't fit the standard categories of Treasuries, real estate, and private credit, but that represent serious on-chain infrastructure with real-world consequences.
Helium is one of the most interesting and misunderstood projects in that space. It is a decentralized wireless network where individuals deploy physical hardware — hotspots — that provide real cellular coverage, and earn HNT tokens in return. The network currently provides 5G coverage across more than 100,000 hotspot locations in the United States, with deployments globally. Operators include Dish Network, which has integrated Helium into its cellular infrastructure.
The RWA angle is less obvious than carbon credits or real estate — but it is arguably more structurally significant. Helium is tokenizing one of the most expensive and capital-intensive real-world assets that exists: telecommunications infrastructure.
What Helium Actually Is
Traditional cellular networks are built by telecommunications companies investing billions in towers, equipment, spectrum licenses, and installation labor. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile each spend $15–20 billion annually on capital expenditure. That capital creates coverage. The coverage generates subscription revenue. The company captures essentially all of that revenue.
Helium inverts this model. Instead of one company owning all the infrastructure, thousands of individuals own the hardware. Each hotspot owner deploys a small cellular radio device — about the size of a router — and connects it to the internet. The device provides cellular coverage in its surrounding area. When phones use that coverage (specifically phones on the Nova Mobile carrier, which runs on Helium), the hotspot owner earns HNT tokens proportional to the coverage they provided and the data they transferred.
The result is a network built by the community, owned by the community, and operated for the community — with the token as the economic mechanism connecting coverage to compensation.
- Network type: Decentralized 5G wireless (also LoRaWAN IoT coverage)
- Coverage: 100,000+ active hotspot locations, primarily US
- Token: HNT (Helium Network Token) — earned by hotspot operators for providing coverage
- Blockchain: Migrated to Solana in 2023 for scalability
- Operator partner: Dish Network has integrated Helium 5G into its MVNO infrastructure
- Mobile carrier: Nova Mobile runs on the Helium network, offering subscribers coverage through the decentralized hotspot network
- Token utility: HNT staked by operators and burned by data consumers — deflationary mechanics tied to real network usage
Why This Is an RWA Story
Telecommunications infrastructure is a real-world asset. A cellular tower generates revenue. A spectrum license has a measurable market value. A fiber cable route has a definable cash flow. These assets are held by large corporations, financed by institutional debt markets, and largely inaccessible to retail participants.
Helium hotspot ownership is tokenized infrastructure investment — in practice, if not by formal legal structure. A hotspot owner invests $300–500 in hardware, deploys it in their home or business, and earns token rewards based on the verifiable coverage and data throughput that hardware provides. The reward is tied to a real output (cellular coverage) that is measured and verified by the network itself, with the on-chain record serving as the audit trail.
The connection to tokenized physical infrastructure goes further. The project that Helium most resembles conceptually is not a DeFi protocol or a speculative token — it is a community-owned utility. If you replaced the token rewards with utility bill credits, and the hotspot hardware with a neighborhood solar panel, the structure is identical to what community energy co-ops have been trying and failing to build for decades. Helium's innovation is using a token to solve the coordination problem that community infrastructure projects have always struggled with: how do you compensate distributed participants proportionally and automatically, without a central administrator?
The Dish Network Validation
The most significant signal of Helium's real-world credibility is not its token market cap or its hotspot count — it is that Dish Network, a regulated US telecommunications company, chose to integrate Helium 5G coverage into its MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) infrastructure.
Dish did not need to do this. It could have built its own 5G infrastructure, as it was required to do by its FCC spectrum license obligations. Instead, it chose to offload a portion of its coverage obligations to the Helium decentralized network. This is an institutional-grade telecommunications company deciding that decentralized, token-incentivized wireless infrastructure is a credible, reliable supplement to its own network. That is not a speculative bet — it is a procurement decision.
The DePin Category — Helium as a Template
Helium is the most mature example of what the sector now calls DePin: Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. The category encompasses any project that uses token incentives to crowdsource real-world infrastructure that would otherwise require centralized capital investment. Beyond wireless coverage, the category includes:
Hivemapper, which pays drivers in HONEY tokens for dashcam footage that builds a decentralized map database competing with Google Maps. Render Network, which aggregates spare GPU compute capacity from individuals and distributes rendering jobs across the network. Storage protocols like Filecoin and Arweave, which pay node operators in tokens for providing reliable decentralized data storage. Akash Network, which provides decentralized cloud compute by aggregating unused server capacity.
Helium pioneered the model for physical, location-dependent infrastructure: the coverage a hotspot provides is verifiable on-chain, the reward is proportional to that verifiable coverage, and the economic incentives are calibrated so that deploying hardware in underserved areas earns more than deploying in already-covered areas. This mechanism naturally produces coverage distribution that matches real demand rather than the economics of traditional carrier capex.
The Honest Assessment
Helium has had a complicated history. The original Helium LoRaWAN network, launched in 2019, attracted hundreds of thousands of hotspot deployments but faced criticism that the theoretical IoT use case was not materializing into real data demand. The pivot to 5G cellular — which uses spectrum more efficiently and has clearer demand — addressed the demand side. The migration to Solana in 2023 addressed the scalability side.
The honest question for any DePin project is whether the token reward mechanism is attracting infrastructure deployment because the underlying product generates real demand — or because speculation about token appreciation makes deployment profitable even without real product usage. Helium's Dish Network partnership and the Nova Mobile carrier are the most direct evidence that real demand exists. But the ratio of speculative hotspot operators to operators earning rewards from genuine network usage is difficult to assess from public data alone.
What Helium has definitively proven is the concept: decentralized, token-incentivized physical infrastructure can produce real-world coverage at scale, attract institutional partnerships, and operate reliably enough to serve actual cellular subscribers. That proof-of-concept is the most valuable thing it has contributed to the broader RWA and DePin space, regardless of where HNT trades.
→ Ones to Watch #01: OriginTrail — Supply Chain Knowledge Graph
→ Ones to Watch #02: Toucan Protocol — Carbon Credits On-Chain
→ 7 Untapped Industries for RWA — Including Infrastructure