The Helium Blockchain

 

The helium blockchain was built from the ground up and it uses a novel consensus mechanism based on honey badger bft which is specially designed to support nodes with a spotty connection.

This is needed because not all helium hotspots are always online. It's also possible that a helium hotspot that's part of the consensus group could go offline in the middle of validating a block in addition to Honey Badger . 

BFT helium runs a sort of secondary consensus mechanism called proof of coverage which is helium's primary incentive structure.

As the name suggests proof of coverage involves checking whether a helium hotspot is broadcasting a long phi signal or not. 

This check is done by a randomly selected helium hotspot within the range of the helium hotspot. Which is being challenged this encourages network participants to set up their hotspots so that their signal range overlaps with others nearby isolated hotspots can still earn rewards but not nearly to the same extent.

If a helium hotspot passes the proof of coverage challenge both the challenger and the challenge earn a portion of block rewards hundreds if not thousands of proof-of-coverage challenges are taking place at any given time around the world.

The large percentage of block rewards allocated to helium hotspot operations have made hosting one quite lucrative now this is a big part of why there are over 200,000 helium hotspots and counting.

Now in addition to helium hotspots there are two other sets of network participants which earn block rewards one of these is helium's validators.

Validators are a recent addition to helium and they were brought in because the rapid growth of the helium network was making it harder for hotspots to effectively participate in the honey badger based consensus. Helium Validators must stake exactly 10,000 HNT which is nearly 200,000 at the time of shooting staking more or less than 10,000 HNT is not allowed and delegation is not possible staking rewards vary according to the amount of HNT being staked with the highest staking reward being 360 percent per year.

Although validators can withdraw their staking rewards every 15 minutes or so the 10,000 HNT they staked has a staggering five month unlock period validators must be online at all times and a failure to do so will result in fewer block rewards and other penalties though slashing is not one of them at least not yet.

Now even with these high barriers to entry and harsh conditions helium has attracted more than 2,700 validators and counting with staking rewards sitting slightly south of 7 per year as a result. Now the third set of network participants that earn helium block rewards are helium investors and helium INC. The software company behind helium and say that is a perfect segue into HNT's Tokenomics.

Links:

1. Helium History

https://fcnmn.blogspot.com/2022/02/helium-history.html

2. How Helium Work

https://fcnmn.blogspot.com/2022/03/how-helium-work.html

3. The Helium Blockchain

https://fcnmn.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-helium-blockchain.html

4. HNT Tokenomics 

https://fcnmn.blogspot.com/2022/02/hnt-tokenomics.html