Helium X DAWN Partnership Supercharges Solana DePIN

Building off an impressive 2024, Solana’s DePIN sector is starting 2025 with a bang. In a landmark partnership, Helium has joined up with DAWN protocol to rapidly expand decentralized mobile and internet networks at unprecedented scale.

The collaboration comes following surging confidence in Solana DePIN protocols, which are retaining users after enjoying high adoption rates in 2024.

How are Helium and DAWN, two would-be competitors, aligining to champion distributed connectivity in 2025?

DAWN Teams Up With Helium in Telco Takeover

Just a few short weeks after announcing investment from TradFi heavyweight VanEck, DAWN has unveiled a new partnership with Helium, a Solana-based DePIN aiming to decentralize mobile network operation.

The collaboration helps merge the two companies separate offerings into a more complete, singular solution. Combining Helium’s mobile hotspots with NODE’s broadband nodes, the partnership enables a fully community-owned mobile and home-based internet.

As part of the partnership, DAWN will be integrating Helium Passpoint into DAWN’s node hardware, effectively expanding Helium Network’s reach while simultaneously connecting Helium mobile subscribers and data offloaders to home and office-based data centers.

8,000 DAWN nodes are slated to be added to Helium’s existing network, with more physical infrastructure rolllouts expected in 2025. 

Community-owned internet and mobile services are projected to save users billions, with DePIN-powered crypto rewards also empowering contributors to generate sustainable revenue. 

The collaboration is expected to dramatically increase Helium’s data offload coverage, boosting contributor rewards and driving value to $HNT through the platform’s Data Credit mint-and-burn mechanism.

Helium’s offload data has enjoyed exponential growth in 2024, rising 1,075,931% from 63 GB in June to a reported 677 TB across over 300k subscribers, based on Helium analytics.

Solana DePIN Rewards Improve

Solana’s flourishing DePIN sector was one of 2024’s hottest narratives in 2024, with projects like Helium, Hivemapper, and Render enjoying new highs in revenue, node deployment, and adoption.

A recent Syndica research report shows that even after the sector’s prolific expansion, users and contributors appear to be aligning with DePIN’s long-term vision. According to Syndica, retention rates among H2 DePIN joiners were higher than their H1 counterparts. While this suggests that newer joiners are more committed to maintaining their contributions and earning rewards, this could also be due to recency bias.

However, improving contributor retention rates could also be due to an increase in average rewards throughout Solana’s DePIN ecosystem. Syndica reports that leading DePIN protocols witnessed an increase in monthly rewards in December, indicating healthy and sustainable revenue growth across the sector.

Despite meteoric growth in 2024, Solana DePIN is still in its infancy. Protocols like Helium and DAWN are rapidly expanding, but they still have a long way to go before disrupting the traditional Telco companies that have monopolized the communications industry.

The DAWN x Helium collaboration represents a critical step forward for DePIN. By joining forces and complementing each others infrastructure networks, DAWN and Helium are better equipped than ever to deliver affordable, community-led internet and mobile services to the masses provide sustainable rewards to contributors.

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