Curriculum·J313 Mining, Validating, and Running Infrastructure·about 43 min
DePIN and infrastructure participation
By the end of this lesson you can
- →Separate external revenue from emissions, and identify who pays each
- →Apply the per-participant revenue test to any infrastructure network
- →Compute the payback period implied by external revenue rather than by rewards
- →State what a token incentive genuinely solves, and what it cannot substitute for
Junior · enrolled learners
This lesson opens with Helium, as reported September 2022.
- What happened
- Helium paid participants in HNT for deploying wireless hotspots, building a network of hundreds of thousands of devices. A Forbes investigation published on 23 September 2022 reported that, using Helium's own figures, revenue generated from data actually moving across the network between June 2021 and August 2022 was about $92,000. Over the same period the company generated about $53.3M, from people registering new hotspots and authenticating other devices onto the network. The hardware itself typically cost several hundred dollars per unit and the token rewards were the reason people bought it.
- The decision point
- The network was real, the hardware worked, and the coverage was genuinely built. What the figures show is where the money came from, which was participants joining rather than customers buying capacity. When onboarding revenue exceeds usage revenue by a factor in the hundreds, the network's paying customer is the participant, and the participant's return is being funded by the next participant plus whoever buys the token.
What you will be able to answer
- →What is the per-participant revenue test?
- →What did the test give for Helium?
- →What payback does that imply?
- →What does a token incentive genuinely solve?
Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.
It is free. We do not sell the list and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Sources and review
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2022/09/23/helium-crypto-tokens-peoples-network/
- https://messari.io/report/understanding-helium-a-comprehensive-overview
- https://docs.helium.com/helium-tokens/data-credit
- https://defillama.com/protocol/helium-network
Confidence medium·Volatility high·Reviewed 2026-08-06·Owner unassigned
Contested
The $92,000 and $53.3M figures come from a single investigation citing the project's own numbers for June 2021 to August 2022, and the project disputed elements of the coverage at the time. The hotspot count near 900,000 is an approximate figure for mid-2022 and is used only to derive an order of magnitude. The conclusion, being that per-participant external revenue was orders of magnitude below hardware cost in that period, holds across a wide range of inputs and does not depend on any one of them.
Helium restructured substantially after this period, including a migration to Solana in April 2023 and the launch of a mobile subnetwork with a different revenue model. This lesson uses the 2021 to 2022 figures as a worked case of the test rather than as a current description of that network. Re-run the test on current numbers before drawing any conclusion about it today.
Per P7 this lesson is not an argument that DePIN does not work. Several networks in this category do collect meaningful external revenue. The lesson supplies the test and applies it to one documented case.