When Your (Helium Phone Service is Free...

Then, your phone number is your wallet.

That’s where I think the team at Helium Mobile is going to take us.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Helium (and a miner in their network), but recently they introduced a $20/month phone plan and, as an early adopter (and a believer in the vision of a decentralized 5G network), I signed up.

The service works (haven’t had any issues so far with coverage) and the UI of the app (and the web app) are slick. I did have a porting issue (my old provider, not Helium was the problem) and the customer support from Helium was first-rate.

But where things get cool is that, alongside your phone number, you get a Solana network address, which makes it really easy (eventually) for someone to text you an NFT or some crypto.

In essence, your phone number (not your phone) is your wallet.

As a sneak peek of this, in your Helium app, there are NFTs (they call them ‘Badges’), which is where assets are going to be held. Right now, I just have the “Subscriber” badge, but it’s easy to see where this could go.

But wait, as they say, there’s more…

if you enable a feature called “Discovery Mapping’ which is the same feature as Location Sharing in your current phone, you can earn MOBILE tokens. Those tokens then can be redeemed to pay your phone bill.

And, if I’m doing the math right, I’m going to be able to pay for the entire next month with the tokens I’ve earned this month.

So, if I am reading this all correctly, Helium is saying “we respect your privacy, but if you want to share your location with you, we’ll pay you with MOBILE tokens that have value (in the form of phone service).”

Then, I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers would need those same MOBILE tokens to access your anonymized location data (or, even better) to pay for the right to send you message directly.

I haven’t fully thought through the tokenomics of this one, but there’s definitely a marketplace in here somewhere that, because it’s a decentralized network, is going to deliver more value to end users using the phone service.

Every now and then, I feel like I experience the future in the present.

Once I got my Helium phone service set up, that’s what happened.

Use my promo code to get a discount, if you do decide to sign up: 0XJWCK8