First and foremost, we just want to thank you for your patience and trust in us. Being a community based company we strive to do everything we can to help you build this network that we believe so deeply in. We appreciate your feedback, positive and negative, as it helps us understand how to grow. You can help us better serve the community with our short survey here.

Nebra Update

The first 320 units have landed stateside (not 325 like the factory was supposed to send) and DHL provided a June 1 estimated delivery date. For the next shipment we have preemptively worked with our forwarding company in preparation for the remainder of batch 1 units. This should expedite future shipments a bit more.

We received many responses from customers who want us to ship their units as is. The loose two loose components are ONLY in this first batch of units. Nebra has addressed the issue with their factory and all subsequent units will be built as expected. They also confirmed that no matter which option you choose, your units are still fully covered under warranty. We will secure the antenna connector and compute modules for those who didn’t respond and ship out immediately. This should take us about 1-2 days to complete. We CANNOT wait to ship these out and get these into your hands, they have been shown to fully sync in record speeds (under 7 hours). We recommend that when you get any miner (no matter the brand), plug the antenna in and connect to ethernet to let it grab the latest firmware and fully sync before installing/deploying.

Get Your Hands Dirty!

Want to try configuring a Light Hotspot? Try out this Dragino LPS8 Gateway (limited stock available soon), it is a great way to learn about gateways and how to configure them with the gateway-rs packet forwarder. Dragino Hotspots will only mine HNT through packet transfer, and is considered a non-PoC Light Hotspot.

Please read the docs before purchasing as these will not mine HNT the way PoC hotspots do right now.

*At the completion of Milestone 1.5, non-PoC Light Hotspots (aka LoRaWAN gateway running gateway-rs) can be added to the blockchain, assert its location, and be seen on explorer.helium.com. These non-PoC Light Hotspots will not participate in Proof-of-Coverage.

Did You Know?

Validators are coming!

We have been operating validator testnet for many months now and it looks like mainnet is right around the corner.

But what are Validators?

Validators are nodes/computers/systems that will validate the blockchain transactions and provide a proof of stake-like network on top of the Proof of Coverage network Helium is built on. All current hotspots have these “validators” built into the miner, participating in consensus groups and validating transactions. Eventually the blockchain will get too big for the hotspots, and for this reason this job is being pulled into what is called a Validator. This offloads the need for hotspots to verify the whole blockchain and stay synced. By removing this piece, light hotspots are born and all they need to do is provide the Proof of Coverage (PoC) and report that back to validators. No more sync issues or growing blockchain sizes pushing the hotspots beyond their limits.

Resources:
Validator FAQs
Validator Deployment Guide

If you’re looking for help in this area or looking for staking providers let us know and we can point you in the right direction.