Binance accounting bug involving Helium tokens results in $19 million of erroneous payouts

Helium has two different tokens: HNT, which is paid out to people who run Helium hotspots, and MOBILE, which is paid to those maintaining the new Helium 5G network. However, Binance erroneously treated both tokens as HNT within their exchange. As a result, anyone who sent MOBILE to Binance wound up with that same number of HNT tokens in their wallet — a big benefit, given that HTN has traded between $4 and $7 this past month, and MOBILE is not yet easily tradable.

Binance distributed around 4.8 million HNT before discovering and patching the bug, valued at around $19 million.

Helium ditches its blockchain

Helium is a network of wireless hotspots that decided to bolt on a cryptocurrency layer a few years after it was created. Through this, they hoped to convince people to spend hundreds of dollars on Helium hotspots, which earn an average of 0.07 HNT ($0.37) a day (2.1 HNT/$11.24 a month) for supplying connectivity to internet of things devices.

Now, Helium is ditching its custom Helium chain in favor of a Solana-based token, and scrapping the blockchain entirely for the portions of its service that actually used the blockchain for anything beyond handling rewards.

Helium seems to have realized, finally, that blockchains tend to be slow as hell. In a blog post about the change, they wrote that "specific transactions, including Proof-of-Coverage and Data Transfer Accounting, are processed on-chain unnecessarily. This data bottleneck can cause efficiency issues such as device join delays and problems with data packet communications, which bloats the Network and causes slow processing times." They outline their plans to move these portions of the project to a "more traditional large data pipeline" — that is, infrastructure that's actually well-suited to that kind of processing.

Helium caught lying that Lime and Salesforce use their network

A graphic from Helium's website, with the header "Helium is used by:" and then a collage of logos including Lime and SalesforceScreenshot of Helium's website (attribution)
Helium, a network of wireless hotspots for low-power devices whose operators are incentivized by a crypto token, has been lying about its relationship with scooter rideshare company Lime. According to an investigation by Matt Binder in Mashable, Helium has been boasting that Helium is used by Lime on their website and describing them in press coverage as a prominent user of the network despite the fact that Helium and Lime never had a formal relationship. "Helium has been making this claim for years and it is a false claim", said a Lime spokesperson.

Helium is a common name that comes up when people are pressed to provide examples of web3 use cases. The New York Times ran a feature on the company in February 2022, titled "Maybe There's a Use for Crypto After All", where Kevin Roose lavished praise on the company and wrote that they had "largely avoided the hype and inflated claims that surround many crypto projects" (oops) and repeated the false claim about a Lime partnership (double oops). Lime said that the Times never contacted them to fact-check the claim; meanwhile, Helium founder Amir Haleem prominently points people to the article with a pinned tweet.

However, a recent Twitter thread by Liron Shapira drew attention to the fact that the company's total monthly revenue from network usage is only $6,500 — raising questions about the feasibility of hotspot operators actually earning much in the way of rewards (as the rewards are distributed based on network usage).

Following the publication of Binder's article, Helium quietly removed Lime's logo from their website, along with that of Salesforce, a CRM software company. Salesforce also confirmed to The Verge that they had no partnership with Helium, and that the graphic on the Helium website where Salesforce's logo was displayed as a user of Helium was "not accurate".

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