He might even have read Fais Khan's 'You Don't Own Web3': A Coinbase Curse and How VCs Sell Crypto to Retail, published three weeks earlier. Chia, another A16Z-backed company, had a similar trajectory, without HNT's early history. Had Roose been paying attention to the fortunes of tokens issued by A16Z-backed companies, he might have noticed that HNT's price history was not unusual. The transaction was structured as a purchase of Helium’s native token, HNT, and included participation from Ribbit Capital, 10T, Alameda Research and Multicoin Capital, according to a statement.Īt that date HNT was trading at $16.46. The Helium Network, a decentralized peer-to-peer 5G wireless network, has raised $111 million in a token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz. Six months earlier, Joanna Ossinger reported that Andreessen-Backed 5G Blockchain Network Raises $111 Million: Of course, money from these corporate customers was not the only money flowing into Helium. Did he check the public blockchain to identify Helium's wallets and see how their HNT token was moving? Did he notice that by the time he wrote HNT had dropped from its peak on 11 th November 2021 of $51.20 to $30.00, and ask other Helium hot-spot owners how they felt about their income being cut 42%? As we shall see, he didn't. So if the network was paying out $182M/year, and it was a sustainable business, it should have been taking in more than $182M/year from the kind of customers Roose described as:Ĭompanies like Lime (which has used Helium to keep tabs on its connected scooters) and the Victor mousetrap company (which uses it for a new line of internet-connected traps).ĭid he call up Lime and ask 'how much are you paying Helium, and are you getting value for it?'. I thought all aspiring journalists of his generation watched All The President's Men and heard Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat say 'follow the money'. If Roose's hot-spot was representative of the network (he didn't check the sub-Reddit to see if it was) that would mean that the network was paying out $3.5M/week or $182M/year. In the first few days after I plugged it into my Wi-Fi router, it generated about $7 worth of $HNT More than 500,000 Helium hot spots are in use around the world, These hot spots, which cost roughly $500 apiece The network is made up of devices called Helium hot spots, gadgets with antennas that can send small amounts of data over long distances using radio frequencies. Helium, a wireless network powered by cryptocurrency, hints at the practical promise of decentralized services.īelow the fold I compare reality with Roose's naive boosterism. He conveniently ignores that conflict of interest policies prevent journalists owning cryptocurrencies, not experiencing them using the paper's money.Ī month earlier Roose had published another masterpiece of credulity entitled Maybe There’s a Use for Crypto After All whose subhead was: Roose responded by justifying 'talking his book' in a since-deleted tweet:Ĭrypto is pretty experiential compared to traditional finance, and it's going to get harder for journalists to report on this stuff if they're prohibited from touching it at all (especially as more activity moves into token-gated Discords, DAOs with ownership requirements, etc.) Last March he wrote The Latecomer's Guide to Crypto, which was so bad that Molly White assembled a group of experts to perform a devastating fact-check. Kevin Roose is a New York Times 'technology columnist' who is infatuated with cryptocurrencies. A major reason that cryptocurrencies have become such a problem is that mainstream journalists normally just regurgitate the hype they are fed by people Talking Their Book.

Helium place