Helium Community Approves HIP 20

Issuance Halvenings, Net Emissions, and a Max Supply are Coming to HNT

After weeks of deliberations, the Helium Community has approved Helium Improvement Proposal 20 (HIP 20), a proposal that introduces a max supply for HNT and the concept of “halvenings,” which will ultimately reduces the supply of HNT every two years on the network’s genesis anniversary.

HIP 20 adjusts the economics of the Helium Network and introduces a max supply of 223M HNT. To date, 60.7M HNT tokens have been mined by miners around the world. Currently 5M HNT are mined every month. Starting on August 1st, 2021 (2nd anniversary of the Helium Network genesis block), HIP 20 will take effect and reduce issuance to 2.5M HNT per month.

Building on the proven scarcity concepts pioneered by the Bitcoin network, HIP 20 also introduces a new feature called “Net Emissions.” Net Emissions is a breakthrough economic construction that serves to incentivize miners even after the hard cap on HNT supply has been reached. Net Emissions have been discussed in abstract by other crypto communities and are also inspired by the work of researchers in the Bitcoin community. When HIP 20 is implemented, Helium will be the first protocol to implement this crypto-economic construction.

The main effects of HIP 20 are:

• Ensures HNT scarcity by capping HNT supply, further enabled by halvenings to HNT issuance every 2 years
• Ensures that there is no change to the cost of transmitting data on the Helium network
• Gives hotspot hosts more motivation to deploy the network as fast as possible to take advantage of the higher HNT issuance in the early days of the network
• Enables Burn and Mint economics to work in harmony with a capped supply of HNT through Net Emissions

The DeWi Alliance is formally requesting the Helium Core Developers begin work on implementing HIP-20 with the goal of deploying the changes as soon as safely possible and no later than August 1st, 2021.

Along with the overwhelming support of the community, our belief is that this will create the right incentives for the growth of the Helium Network.

In closing, we’d like to thank the authors of this proposal, and the community members who contributed to its design. We’d also like to thank the Helium Blockchain team who will work to make this proposal a reality.

Sincerely,

DeWi Alliance