Helium aims to improve the communication capabilities of wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In 2013, infrastructure around IoT was still in its infancy, but developers wanted to add decentralization to their offering, hence referring to it as “The People’s Network” in official literature.

Its core appeal will be to device owners and those interested in the IoT space, with financial incentives providing further outreach possibilities.

Network participants purchase Hotspots — a combination of a wireless gateway and a miner — or build their own. Each hotspot provides network coverage over a certain radius, and also mines Helium’s native token, HNT.

The network runs on proof-of-coverage, a new consensus algorithm based on the HoneyBadger BFT protocol which allows nodes in a network to reach consensus when connection quality is highly variable.

In addition to HNT, users pay transaction fees in a separate token called Data Credits, which are not exchangeable and tied to individual users themselves.