Summary
Primary-source vote-tally screenshot from the Helium Vote governance portal for HIP-138 (“Return to HNT”). The vote closed November 22, 2024, 7:00 PM. The proposal — which consolidated the IoT and Mobile subnetwork tokens into a single HNT at 1:1 ratio — passed 92.54% on 476,224,373.14 veHNT cast. The top voter on HIP-138 was an anonymous wallet (HKcAP…NqsJ) at 15.00% with 72,935,584.76 veHNT — no proxy yet reaches the 24%+ concentration that ferebee and Nova Labs would hit on HIP-143 and HIP-148 the following year. HIP-138 is the “pre-concentration” snapshot of the network’s governance distribution.
The vote occurred in November 2024; the token migration was completed in January 2025. Article-writing implication: “HIP-138 passed in January 2025” is incorrect — passage was November 22, 2024; the migration completion was January 2025.
Key Points
Vote tally:
- For HIP 138: 440,725,111.04 veHNT (92.54%)
- Against HIP 138: 35,499,261.19 veHNT (7.45%)
- Total veTOKENS cast: 476,224,373.14
- Vote close: November 22, 2024, 7:00 PM
- Categories tagged on the proposal: HIP / Economic / Technical / Governance
Voter breakdown (top 12 voters as displayed in portal):
| Owner (truncated) | Choice | Vote Power | % | Proxy Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HKcAP…NgsJ | For HIP 138 | 72,935,584.76 | 15.00% | — |
| B3Cx9…d5cHB | For HIP 138 | 44,346,501.71 | 9.00% | — |
| Aljkd…FiQpn | For HIP 138 | 30,000,000.00 | 6.00% | — |
| BdSHT…dPEPm | For HIP 138 | 30,000,000.00 | 6.00% | — |
| 9SVLG…lp6GT | For HIP 138 | 25,464,604.57 | 5.00% | — |
| 7pAcd…3FbVL | For HIP 138 | 23,620,073.99 | 4.00% | — |
| EpMcK…Rpcma | For HIP 138 | 22,500,000.00 | 4.00% | — |
| 2Ggw…shrRg | For HIP 138 | 15,000,000.00 | 3.00% | — |
| CCsBt…5dpoS | For HIP 138 | 12,097,760.77 | 2.00% | — |
| HsStj…9w2u9 | For HIP 138 | 8,286,326.65 | 1.00% | — |
| ATHY3…8FfPy | For HIP 138 | 7,867,646.08 | 1.00% | — |
| 3wHTm…lQ8ya | For HIP 138 | 7,500,000.00 | 1.00% | — |
Visible “proxy name” column is uniformly blank for all top 12 voters on HIP-138. Either (a) none of the top voters had set public proxy labels by November 2024, or (b) the labels visible on HIP-143 and HIP-148 (Nova Labs, ferebee, Jay M., AndrewsMD, Keith Rettig) were set onto these or other wallets after November 2024.
The pre-concentration finding:
- The top single voter held 15.00% of the HIP-138 vote.
- The top two voters combined held 24.00% — equivalent to ferebee’s individual HIP-143 share five months later.
- The top three combined held 30.00% — equivalent to ferebee’s individual HIP-148 share eleven months later.
- The top 12 voters combined held 57.00% — equivalent to ferebee + Nova Labs’s combined two-proxy share on HIP-148 eleven months later.
- No single proxy had majority-of-yes-vote share yet. No named labels yet. The “DePIN franchise” architecture documented in HIP-143/148 was not visible at this vote.
Wallet continuity check (cross-vote):
HKcAP…NgsJwas the top voter on HIP-138 (15.00%, For) AND the largest “Against” vote on HIP-143 (8.00%, 63.6M veHNT). The same wallet that approved HIP-138 voted against HIP-143’s pricing-authority delegation five months later. The wallet had no public proxy name on either vote.7pAcd…3FbVLvoted For on both HIP-138 (4.00%) and HIP-148 (2.00%). Wallet share dropped in % but not in absolute terms across votes — the network voting universe roughly doubled between Nov 2024 and Oct 2025.- No wallet labeled “Nova Labs” or “ferebee” appears in the HIP-138 top-12. Either those proxies did not yet exist as labeled entities, or they held <1% positions on HIP-138.
What the proposal did (from the on-portal description plus HIP-138 markdown):
- Migrated the IoT subDAO token (IOT) and the Mobile subDAO token (MOBILE) into a single unified HNT.
- 1:1 ratio at the migration cutover.
- Eliminated the subDAO-token-redemption mechanism established by HIP-53 (Mobile) and the analogous IoT framework — collapsing the two-sub-token architecture into one master token.
- Set the substrate that HIP-143 (delegating pricing authority over the Mobile subnetwork) and HIP-148 (redirecting Mobile emissions to Nova Labs) would later operate on.
Why this matters for the trajectory:
The cleanest “before/after” snapshot the wiki has of Helium governance:
| Vote | Date | Total veHNT | Top voter % | Proxy labels visible | Top 2 combined |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HIP-53 | Jul 25, 2022 | 2.44M | (not displayed) | none | n/a |
| HIP-138 | Nov 22, 2024 | 476.22M | 15.00% (anonymous) | none in top 12 | 24% |
| HIP-143 | Apr 3, 2025 | 763.50M | 26.00% (Nova Labs) | Nova Labs, ferebee, Jay M., others | 50% |
| HIP-148 | Oct 10, 2025 | 902.28M | 31.00% (ferebee) | ferebee, Nova Labs, Jay M., AndrewsMD, Keith Rettig | 57% |
The Nov 22, 2024 → Apr 3, 2025 step is where the franchise architecture becomes visible. Concentration jumps from “top voter at 15%, no labels” to “top voter at 26%, named proxies controlling 50%.”
Newsletter Angles
- The concentration is a 2025 phenomenon, not a Helium-from-inception condition. HIP-138 (Nov 2024) shows a distributed top of the voting curve with no named proxies. By April 2025, the franchise architecture is visible. The five-month gap between HIP-138 and HIP-143 is the period in which proxies labeled “Nova Labs” and “ferebee” either accumulated their veHNT positions, applied public proxy labels to existing positions, or both. This is a reportable gap.
- Article correction surfaced by this source. Articles dating HIP-138 to “January 2025” should specify: vote closed November 22, 2024; migration completed January 2025. The 2-month gap is material for any timeline-of-governance argument.
- The anonymous top voter (HKcAP…NgsJ) flipped against HIP-143. Same wallet, 15% on HIP-138 (For), then 8% on HIP-143 (Against). Worth flagging as the largest unlabeled dissenter in the wiki to date — distinct from Keith Rettig (HIP-148’s labeled dissent). The two together represent the named and unnamed faces of opposition to the post-2024 governance trajectory.
Entities Mentioned
- Helium Network — the protocol being governed
- Nova Labs — does NOT appear in the HIP-138 top-12 voter breakdown; either had no labeled proxy or held <1% of voting power at this date
- ferebee — also does NOT appear in HIP-138 top-12; same caveat
Concepts Mentioned
- DePIN — pre-concentration distribution snapshot for the canonical DePIN case study
- Tokenomics — sub-token consolidation as the mechanical precondition for later emissions-direction proposals
Notes
Primary source: one PNG screenshot of the Helium Vote portal preserved at raw/assets/HIP-138 vote results.png. The vote portal is JS-rendered; screenshot captured manually 2026-05-19. The specific heliumvote.com proposal URL is not visible in the screenshot’s address bar.
Author line for HIP-138 is not visible in the captured screenshot (the portal view that was captured shows vote tally + voter breakdown but not the proposal header where authors would appear). The HIP-138 markdown at https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/main/0138-return-to-hnt.md will have the canonical author list. Follow-up: capture the HIP-138 summary view to document authors against the same provenance standard as HIP-143/HIP-148 wiki source pages.
The 12-row voter breakdown is the full visible portion of the captured screenshot; there may be additional voters below the top 12 that the screenshot does not include. The displayed percentages (15%, 9%, 6%, 6%, 5%, 4%, 4%, 3%, 2%, 1%, 1%, 1% = 57% top 12) leaves ~43% distributed across smaller voters not visible in this capture.
The portal’s “Proxy Name” column is uniformly blank for the visible top-12 — this is the most consequential data point on the screenshot, and it’s worth a follow-up: cross-check whether the blank labels reflect actual absence of proxy labeling in November 2024, or a portal-display difference between the HIP-138 view and the HIP-143/148 views. If the latter, then the “Nova Labs” and “ferebee” labels visible on HIP-143/148 may have been retroactively applied via the proxy registry and the 2024 voting universe may have been more concentrated than the screenshot suggests.