An In-Depth Look Into Helium's Decentralized Machine Network

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Blockchain

• Track & Trace of Assets

The Internet of Things is an $800 billion industry, with over 8.4 billion connected devices online, and spending predicted to reach nearly $1.4 trillion by 2021 [1]. Most of these devices need to connect to the Internet to function. However, current solutions such as cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth are suboptimal: they are too expensive, too power hungry, or too limited in range.

Helium is a decentralized machine network that enables machines anywhere in the world to wirelessly connect to the Internet and geolocate themselves without the need for powerhungry satellite location hardware or expensive cellular plans. Powering the network is a blockchain with a native protocol token incentivizing a two-sided marketplace between coverage providers and coverage consumers.

• We present a computationally inexpensive Proof-of-Coverage that allows miners to prove they are providing wireless network coverage. We anchor these proofs using a Proof-of-Serialization that allows miners to prove they are accurately representing time relative to others on the network in a cryptographically secure way.

• We demonstrate an entirely new purposebuilt blockchain network built to service the Wireless Protocol and provide a system for authenticating and identifying machines, providing cryptographic guarantees of data transmission and authenticity, offer transaction primitives designed around the wireless protocol, and more

• We present a novel consensus protocol construction that creates a permissionless, high throughput, censor-resistant system by combining an asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol with identities presented via Proof-of-Coverage.