Helium History

The first name sounds familiar that's because Shawn Fanning is the Co-Founder of Napster. The first peer-to-peer music sharing platform which amassed over 27 million users in its short 3 year lifespan.

Shawn currently serves as an advisor to helium likely because he has half a dozen other startups. Sean Carey is a Seasoned Systems Architect and he served as helium's CTO until he stepped down in 2015. Sean's presentation about helium at hardwired NYC is the oldest video about the project. 

Amir Haleem is a professional gamer and video game designer and he was once the best quake player in the world respect. He currently sits as Helium CEO and is a Die Hard Cypherpunk.

Now according to Amir Helium was the outcome of one of the many conversations. he had with Napster Shawn over the years after meeting him in 2005. They basically wanted to recreate the peer-to-peer model of Napster with wireless networks and without the risk of being shut down for breaking laws like Napster did with copyright.

Initially they were hoping to target the telecommunications market but realized that the red tape would make it next to impossible and the existing players had too much financial and political power. At the time the concept of the internet of things or IOT was becoming increasingly popular as wireless devices were becoming more common IOT is the buzzword of all buzzwords these days and it basically consists of extracting data from the real world.

Using sensors these sensors include things like laptops mobile phones parking meters and even dog collars. Amir had some friends who had tried and failed to get IOT projects off the ground and he realized that IOT companies were failing because creating IOT infrastructure in a centralized manner made zero economic sense.

The low frequency used for IOT also has no laws licensing or regulations attached at least in the united states. where helium was based this made IOT the perfect fit for helium's peer-to-peer network the only problem is that helium had no way to incentivize people to set up this peer-to-peer IOT network and the whole project stalled as a result.

when crypto started making headlines in 2016 however Amir realized that cryptocurrency could create the right incentives after being inspired by the file coin white paper in 2017.  Amir rallied the gang and they got to work in June 2019 helium revealed its first physical helium hotspot devices which would power its peer-to-peer IOT infrastructure.

Helium's main net went live one month later creating the cryptocurrency coin which would incentivize people to join their new decentralized network.