Angel investor says Helium has no demand, returns are poor

Angel investor Liron Shapira said that decentralized wireless internet protocol Helium (HNT) generated only $6,500 monthly for investors after the hundreds of millions invested in the firm.

Helium returns have been poor

In a July 26 Twitter thread, Shapira claimed that users who spent between $400 and $800 buying the hotspot nodes per month have complained about the poor returns.

Instead of the expected returns of  $100 per month, users have been getting around $20.

Shapira claimed that even the $20 return is due to “a temporary subsidy of $19.99 from investment in growing the network, and speculation on the value of the $HNT token.”

It means that the actual revenue is only $0.01 per month.

No end users demand

Additionally, he claimed that Novalabs, the company behind Helium, gets $300 million (30 million HNT) annually from the network.

Shapira said this revenue comes mostly from retail speculators on the HNT token because the Helium network does not have an end-user demand.

In his opinion, this is responsible for its lack of revenue despite having over 500,000 hotspots. But “the complete lack of end-user demand for Helium should not have come as a surprise.”

He added, “a basic LoRaWAN market analysis would have revealed that this was a speculation bubble around a fake, overblown use case.”

Helium’s response

Helium leadership has responded to Shapira’s claims with a Twitter thread defending the network.

Amir Haleem Helium CEO stated that Nova Labs has only raised $250 million since launch, and it “was for equity in the company, not for tokens in the network.”

He also touched on the revenue claims, saying Helium generates $2 million monthly from onboarding fees.

Haleem said the $6,500 alleged revenue was from the monthly 650 million data packets sent over the network. He continued that the number is small because most of the devices and applications that can use it have not been built.

He also disagreed with the claim that the Helium service has no demand in the market. According to him, Helium focuses on LoRaWAN and already has a waiting market.

He said that the network has close to 1 million nodes and covers 10% of the world’s population. The time horizon is 5-10 years, and only after that can anyone consider Helium to have failed.

Shapira reiterates claims

Meanwhile, Shapira has posted a rejoinder disagreeing with the claims and reiterated that Helium is a failure waiting to happen.

According to him, the Helium team has “built a Web3 bridge to nowhere.”

Shapira also mentioned that Helium’s response to his thread “didn’t deny the shocking data I shared, or explain why the project failed so bad.”

Source: https://cryptoslate.com/angel-investor-says-helium-has-no-demand-returns-are-poor/