Helium

One of the areas of blockchain innovation I am most excited about is building open, permissionless, and decentralized technology infrastructure.

The three areas that seem most obvious to me for decentralized infrastructure are compute (code execution), storage (storing files, etc), and bandwidth (network infrastructure).

And today, we are excited to announce that USV has made an investment in a decentralized network infrastructure project called Helium.

My partner Nick, who led this investment for USV, wrote about Helium on the USV blogand explains why we made the investment (as is our practice with all new investments). I would encourage you to read that blog post as it explains a lot about how Helium works, how the token economics builds the supply side of the network infrastructure, and why it fits so neatly into our investment thesis.

I would just like to point out how cool Helium is.

Anyone can run a Helium hotspot in their home:

And then they can earn Helium tokens for doing so.

You can run a hotspot in your home/apartment and do the equvalent of bitcoin mining for network infrastructure.

Helium is optimized for very long distance, low power communications. It is ideal for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Think about electric scooters needing to “phone home” over long distances. Think about your dog’s name tag. Think about figuring out when the school bus is going to arrive at the bus stop.

We plan to run a Helium hotspot or two at USV and it would be great to see people powered Helium networks popping up all over the place and providing very low cost, low power, highly reliable long range network infrastructure.