Hello from the new CEO

Abhay Kumar, former Nova Labs Chief Product Officer, is joining the Helium Foundation as CEO. The Solana engineering team from Strata has been acquired as part of the effort to migrate all protocol development to the Foundation.

gm Helium Community,

Many of you know me as hashc0de in the Helium Discord. I’ve been involved in the community since 2019, authored my first HIP in summer 2020, and joined the core development team at Nova Labs as Chief Product Officer in the fall of 2020. I’m proud to be part of such an inspirational movement that has built the world’s largest peer-to-peer wireless network. I’m excited and honored to share that, effective Friday, I will be taking on the role of CEO and Chair of the Helium Foundation.

We’re entering the next phase of growth for the Helium Network and need to shift our collective focus. As a community, we’ve built a global wireless network of close to 1 million Hotspots that can be used for a variety of applications. The network has never been more reliable and ubiquitous, and it is at a state where public utilities and enterprises can depend on it for critical applications. As CEO of the Helium Foundation, I am prioritizing efforts to enable this growth while elevating our standards of governance and foundation operations.

Our technology needs to operate at greater scale with security and reliability to match. HIP 51 introduced the opportunity for multiple networks to be built within the Helium Ecosystem, and its passing opened the discussion for a more scalable framework for deploying wireless networks and the migration to a new blockchain. The community approval of HIP 70, formalized this architecture and proposed a move of the underlying tokens and governance to the Solana Blockchain. That mandate along with the corresponding technical work demands a prolific and diligent engineering team that’s intimately familiar with the Solana technology stack and ingrained in the Solana developer ecosystem.

I’m proud to announce that, in order to meet these needs, the Helium Foundation has acquired The Strata Protocol, a company that has a track record of building new technical primitives on Solana. I have also appointed Noah Prince, the CEO of Strata, as Head of Protocol Engineering at the Helium Foundation. Noah and his team have already begun work on the technical migration under my supervision, and we are targeting early January to launch HNT on Solana’s mainnet. The Helium Foundation will continue to host our AMAs to update the community on our progress.

Taking the seat of CEO at Helium Foundation means stepping down from my role as Chief Product Officer of Nova Labs. Over the past few years, the Helium Foundation (formerly “Decentralized Wireless Alliance”) and Nova Labs (formerly “Helium Systems Inc”) have worked closely to grow our ecosystem. This next phase of growth must ensure the Helium Network remains credibly neutral. Helium is and always will be an open-source project enabled by community participation and, with the contributions of the Nova Labs team and several other teams in the ecosystem, we will fulfill the mission of our decentralized wireless network. The stewardship of the network’s technical direction, consensus rules, and decentralized governance must sit with the Foundation, a neutral organization that does not operate a for-profit application on top of the network itself. Therefore, at my request, the Foundation will be open-sourcing the wallet that’s been operated by Nova Labs. We have also open-sourced the Solana contracts so that we can begin open review and kick off formal security audits.

Having authored previous technical roadmaps, I will be migrating that responsibility from Nova Labs to the Foundation going forward. In addition to acquiring the Strata team, the Foundation team will continue to grow in order to help sustain development for Proof-of-Coverage and LoRaWAN infrastructure. Nova Labs will continue to be a thoughtful and active contributor, focused on generating commercial activity on the network. The Foundation will now lead all blockchain-related development in order to ensure the network stays credibly neutral. Once these transitions are complete, I plan to work closely with the community with the aim of publishing a technical roadmap for 2023 by the end of this year.

I’m thrilled to be working directly with Scott Sigel, Helium Foundation’s COO. Scott has grown the organization from a team of one in January 2021 to 14 full-time employees, not including our advisors and contractors. The addition of Strata brings our headcount to 17. Over the next few months, I plan to continue to aggressively grow the Foundation — we’re actively hiring for multiple roles! In the meantime, meet the Foundation team on our new team page here.

The Grant Program continues to see exciting LoRaWAN use cases and will continue investing in supporting the demand side of our IOT network. I also invite the community to participate in the new Governance calls as we work towards a scalable framework to distribute authority over the Network.

As a community, we’ve built something incredible that’s no easy task. The Helium Network promises a more connected world, which is a positive-sum pursuit that leaves no person or device behind. Peer-to-peer wireless allows individuals and communities to close the digital divide created by the economic inefficiencies of traditional telecom infrastructure. Now is the time to fulfill that promise. I’m excited to share this journey with you all and take Helium to the next level as a global wireless network where everyone wins.

LFG!

Abhay Kumar
CEO
Helium Foundation