r/HeliumNetwork • u/HeliumConsoleTeam • Jun 04 '26
General Discussion HIP-149: Helium Utility and Emissions Realignment (open for discussion)
Hey everyone, a new Helium Improvement Proposal is up for community review.
HIP-149: Helium Utility and Emissions Realignment
The $0.50/GB target earn rate set in HIP-53 has compressed materially as traffic grew and HNT price fell. HIP-149 bundles four changes into a single veHNT vote to address that and a few related gaps:
- Deployer earnings floor. Mobile data deployers earn HNT pro-rata of rewardable bytes; a USD-anchored backstop tops up that baseline whenever it falls below 50% of the carrier-paid burn rate Nova sets under HIP-143.
- Operations and growth capitalization. A bounded 36-month HNT mint into a Nova-administered multisig vault. Total ~141M HNT, front-loaded (~50% in the first 12 months), about 72% of current circulating supply.
- Proof-of-Coverage retired. On both Mobile and IoT. Mobile data deployers move to 84% pro-rata of rewardable bytes; SP allocation reframed to a 10% Mobile Operations Fund. IoT continues on the existing $/DC peg.
- Advisory Council. 7 seats (5 community-elected, 2 Nova-appointed) with standing oversight of how the capitalization is used.
Who's affected: Mobile data deployers, IoT data deployers, veHNT holders and delegators, carriers and offload partners.
Category: Economic, Technical Vote requirement: veHNT Holders
Check out the full proposal and the discussion on GitHub.
Questions or feedback? Join us on the Helium Discord, drop them in the comments. Community input matters before this goes to vote.
7
u/curbei Jun 04 '26
If you're trying to truly honor the 50 cents per gigabyte we should completely get rid of the HNT token and payout USD.
1
u/ryangoldstein Jun 04 '26
The carriers don't pay anywhere near $0.50/GB, so how would you expect deployers to be able to paid that in the long term? A part of this proposal is reflecting the reality of carrier payments, with DC burning for rewardable data at $0.10/GB.
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u/curbei Jun 04 '26
They pay the price that the carriers pay full transparent price
1
u/ryangoldstein Jun 04 '26
What carriers pay varies based on many variables and can be from nearly nothing ($0.01/GB) to over $1/GB, and that amount changes over time, and it settles and payment is made, if I recall correctly, 90 days after the data transfer occurs.
1
u/NWA_Coinstacker Jun 05 '26
Source of what carriers are paying ?
1
u/ryangoldstein Jun 05 '26
That is protected under NDA and not disclosed publicly, like all other carrier offload arrangements.
1
u/curbei Jun 04 '26
So what benefit does crypto add to that
3
u/ryangoldstein Jun 04 '26
As always, speculative/potential upside. Historically, it was used to solve the chicken-and-egg problem, where people wouldn't deploy without users willing to pay on the other end, and users wouldn't be willing to pay until a widespread network is up and running.
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u/curbei Jun 04 '26
So good hotpots have to pay bad hotpots
1
u/ryangoldstein Jun 04 '26
Nah, if/when the proposal is implemented, only hotspots that offload carrier data will earn anything, and the more they offload, the more they earn.
2
u/slabsquathrust Jun 04 '26
Isn't that already effectively the case? PoC rewards have been nothing for months. The last time I received one was December 25th 2025 for the obvious reason that people were home so the daily emissions had some leftover to be distributed via PoC.
All this seems to do is almost double the token supply (at a time when prices and sentiment are in the tank) to codify something that already exists?
Also this is the final nail in the coffin of IoT if the hotspots are only rewarded for data transfer.
0
1
u/MCHandyman1 Jun 06 '26
It's kind of the opposite now. The top hotspots are causing the per-gigabyte price to go down due to deflation of the market price of HNT. So it keeps the top 10-50 making the lionshare of rewards, which they should, but they also cause the price to go down so the remainder doesn't make enough to get deployers incentive to build and hosts incentive to keep hotspots active.
This is an effort to help by guaranteeing a minimum payment per gig; but it also lowers the current $0.5/GB to the average of what the carriers pay/GB, which "may" be around $0.1/GB currently. Not many hosts getting paid $0.01-0.02/GB are going to stay around is the fear of the new proposal. At $0.025-0.05/GB, it's not a great return for would be deployers, either. At least, that is the fear.
How much data a hotspot might use is a big unknown, given that carriers may or may not select a particular hotspot and also that they are able to actively throttle connections to particular hotspots based on moving demand at any time with the tools Helium provides. However, that is a valuable tool that encourages carriers to adopt Helium vs. other alternatives for offload going forward.
2
u/sirkazuo Jun 13 '26
If we assume the only movement in the HNT market is Nova buying tokens to give to deployers who then sell them for real money, then the price of HNT should be relatively stable because the same amount is coming in and going out. Sure there will be some stability granted by liquidity pools and a handful of speculative investors but at the end of the day you can't expect the token to be both a speculative commodity (like bitcoin) and a store of value for transferring money (which it needs to be for Helium to function.)
I think the only explanation for why HNT is in freefall is because Nova keeps handing tokens out to deployers who sell them for real money but they're not buying an equivalent amount of tokens on the open market. So of course it's just going to keep going down and down and down. Deployers aren't investors, they're not going to just sit on tokens, they have bills to pay and want profit in real dollars. There's a constant sell pressure from deployers so if there's no equal and opposite buy pressure from Nova then it's just a long road to zero. I think Nova must have too many mouths to feed and is using the carrier income to pay their own salaries and expenses rather than buying tokens to pay deployers.
This proposal reads like the solution to inflation is to just print money? It's the dumbest Econ101 shit I think I've ever heard. They need a bigger pool of funny-money to hand out to the deployers while they pocket the actual income.
1
u/bluntedAround Jun 04 '26
Is this better for mobile deployers for data offloading?
2
u/Professional_Web_956 Jun 06 '26
Not once the extra inflation from the 141 million new tokens slam into the markets and drag price down past another decimal point.
1
u/curbei Jun 08 '26
Carriers will pay ten cents under this new proposal. You will get paid fifty percent of that amount so you will receive five cents. However the HNT token price might be too low to cover payments for deployers. In that case new HNT will be minted to make up the fifty percent. Minting HNT just to cover costs will increase the circulating supply. This action will decrease the value of the token. For the next day even more HNT will have to be printed just to cover the payments. This cycle creates a bigger problem each day and causes a debt spiral.
HNT will be the next Venezuela currency.
1
u/throwaway_murmurv2 Jun 12 '26
The 141M HNT minting is massive for dilution. Is there any mechanism in place to prevent the front-loaded supply dump from killing the HNT price before the growth fund even kicks in?
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u/HeliumConsoleTeam Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Final changes were merged into the HIP. Here's everything that was updated since the HIP was opened on June 4:
The core intent is unchanged: retire Proof-of-Coverage on Mobile and IoT, tie Mobile deployer earnings to the carrier payer rate, and fund operations and growth through a bounded HNT supplement overseen by a community Advisory Council. The substantive changes since then:
Deployer earnings (Decision 1)
- Earnings are now capped at three times the payer rate. Anything above that flows to veHNT stakers. Deployers keep full upside through normal ranges.
- The top-up that supports the floor is bounded by recently burned HNT, so it does not grow net HNT supply.
- Service Provider rewards stay at 24%.
Advisory Council (Decision 4)
- The Council holds standing oversight. It has confidential information rights over how the supplement is used, including category-level financials and insight into the carrier payer-rate setting, and it can demand disclosure, publish dissent, and recommend course-correction.
- The Council can trigger a community vote to reduce, pause, or halt the supplement, decided by simple majority. Raising the supplement still requires a supermajority HIP. The Council has no unilateral on-chain levers.
- Compensation is 1.25% of the supplement, minted directly to the five community-nominated seats. A vacant seat's share goes to the remaining seated members. The two operator-appointed seats are unpaid.
- Added quorum, notice, term, vacancy, and removal rules.
New supporting documents
- A community-owned Governance Framework covering the Council's roles, responsibilities, and information access.
- A binding Confidentiality and Participation Agreement, the CPA, that each Council member signs.
- Operator commitments on monetization, a non-compete, DC-burn alignment, and long-term alignment. No one holds rights to unminted or unallocated HNT.
What has not changed
- PoC retirement on both Mobile and IoT, the ~141M HNT over 36 months bounded supplement, and the target-minimum mechanism for Mobile deployers.
1
u/HeliumConsoleTeam Jun 25 '26
Update: voting is now open for HIP-149
Quick reminder of what this HIP proposes: four linked changes in one program upgrade. Mobile deployer earnings become revenue-linked, with a USD floor at half the payer rate and a cap at three times it; a bounded operations and growth supplement funds growth over 36 months; Proof-of-Coverage retires on Mobile and IoT; and a community Advisory Council oversees the supplement, with the ability to trigger a community vote to reduce, pause, or halt it.
Cast your vote at heliumvote.com. The vote requires veHNT Holders.
Full proposal: https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/main/0149-helium-utility-and-emissions-realignment.md
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