Summary
Messari quarterly research report on Helium for Q4 2025. The definitive third-party operator-economics dataset. Reveals: (1) carrier offload growing fast but real network revenue still modest ($11M annualized ex-discretionary, $22.4M run-rate Dec); (2) IoT network is effectively dead as a business ($124.77/day in Data Credit burns); (3) Helium Mobile is the entire growth story.
Key Points
Revenue and burns:
- Annualized revenue (excluding discretionary burns): $11.0 million
- December 2025 monthly revenue: $1.9 million
- Annualized run rate (Dec): $22.4 million
- Average daily Data Credit burns (Q4): $56,760 (83.6% QoQ growth)
- Mobile share of daily burns: $56,635 (99.8% of total)
- IoT share of daily burns: $124.77 — the entire IoT network generated ~$45K/year in real utility revenue in Q4 2025
- Mobile Offloading share of Mobile burns: 43.9% ($24,883/day)
Discretionary burn experiment (Aug 2025 – Jan 2 2026):
- Helium Mobile routed 100% of subscriber revenue to HNT purchases on open market, then burned
- Q4 produced $2.9M in discretionary burns ($31,765/day)
- Goal: tie network usage to token value via predictable buying pressure
- Suspended January 2, 2026 by CEO Amir Haleem to focus on user growth and carrier offload
- For the first time, DC burn exceeded HNT emissions during the experiment
Carrier offload (Q4 2025):
- 4,388 TB offloaded from major U.S. carriers (60.7% QoQ from 2,731 TB)
- Cumulative offload since inception: 9,839 TB
- Carrier partners: AT&T, Telefónica’s Movistar, Google Orion, Wefi
- New: Mambo WiFi (Brazil) partnership announced Dec 10 2025 — 40K access points
Users and subscribers:
- Average daily users (Q4): 1.6 million (32.4% QoQ)
- Peak daily users: 2.5 million (Dec 20)
- First crossed 2 million daily users November 22 2025; >15 days above 2M in Q4
- Helium Mobile signups (end Q4): 595,800 (29.1% QoQ from 461,500)
- Average daily new signups: 1,815 (11.1% QoQ from 1,634)
- Average daily mobile paid traffic: 49.6 TB (52.9% QoQ from 32.4 TB)
- Cumulative paid traffic: 13,069.4 TB (53.7% QoQ)
Helium Mobile plans:
- Zero: $0/month — 1 GB Nationwide + 2 GB Helium Hotspot
- Sprout (Kids): $5/month — 3 GB
- Air: $15/month — 10 GB
- Infinity: $30/month — Unlimited
- All plans earn Cloud Points (redeemable for eGift cards / charity donations)
Hotspot counts:
- Mobile Hotspots total: 121,138 (+8.5% QoQ)
- Helium Mobile branded: 35,595 (29.5%)
- Helium Plus (third-party): 85,553 (70.5%)
- IoT Hotspots: 43,033 onboarded since Solana migration (Apr 2023); +342,000 pre-migration = ~385,000 total
- IoT growth: just 0.9% QoQ — network barely growing
HNT price (Q4):
- Q3 close: $2.44 → Q4 close: $1.37 (-43.9% QoQ)
- Market cap rank: 128th (end Q3) → 136th (end Q4)
- “Drop in market cap showed no correlation with Helium’s daily active users or DC consumption, both of which increased in Q4. Instead, it mirrored the broader crypto market, which declined 23.7% over the same period, indicating that price is still more closely tied to speculation than it is to real network usage.”
HIP-148 (October 2025):
- Eliminated Mobile Mapping rewards (gaming behavior, low utility)
- Redirected 20% of HNT emissions to Service Provider Pool + Data Transfer Pool
- Subscribers previously earned HNT for sharing mapping data; now earn Cloud Points instead
- Reward pool previously only accessible to Helium hotspot deployers — now to subscribers via Cloud Points
Newsletter Angles
- $124.77/day IoT is the killshot stat for the IoT half of the network. The IoT subDAO that exists to govern this revenue generates approximately one Helium Mobile Air plan per day in actual utility revenue.
- The “discretionary burn” experiment is its own story: Helium Mobile artificially propped up HNT demand for five months by buying tokens on the open market with subscriber revenue, then quietly suspended it. The DC-burn-exceeds-emissions milestone (first time ever) only happened because of this artificial buying. Suspended January 2, 2026.
- HIP-148 (Oct 2025) is the second governance-shifts-economics-after-deployment event in 18 months. Mobile mappers who had been earning HNT for sharing their data got moved to “Cloud Points” (gift cards). Like HIP-143, this passed without organized opposition. The operators who deployed during the mapping-rewards era are not getting paid in HNT anymore.
- The “Helium Team Commentary” section quotes the Helium team directly saying: “The model successfully aligns the economic interests of individual operators with the cost-cutting mandates of major carriers.” That sentence is the entire argument. The operators are aligned with the carriers’ cost-cutting needs. Not aligned with each other. Not aligned with capturing the value they create.
Entities Mentioned
- Helium Network — primary subject
- Nova Labs — Helium Mobile operator; discretionary burn experiment; CEO Amir Haleem suspended program
- T-Mobile — MVNO backbone for Helium Mobile
- AT&T — carrier offload partner
- Mambo WiFi — Brazil carrier offload partner (40K access points)
- Telefónica — parent of Movistar
Concepts Mentioned
- DePIN — Helium positioned as flagship DePIN
- Tokenomics — HNT burn-and-mint mechanics; veHNT governance; HIP-138 token consolidation
- Carrier Offload — primary growth driver
Notes
The “Helium Team Commentary” section is explicitly labeled as Helium’s own writing, not Messari analysis. This matters: when the report quotes them saying operators are “aligned with the cost-cutting mandates of major carriers,” that’s the project’s own self-description, not a critic’s reading.
User added the partial scrape — the article’s images (charts) are referenced but not preserved as PNGs in raw/assets/. The financial figures in this summary are extracted from the body text, which contains the data the charts visualize.
Companion sources: Helium HIP-143 Vote Results — Helium Vote - 2025-04-03, Helium Halving 2025 — Helium Blog - 2025-07-24, Helium Hotspot Earnings 2025 — AMBCrypto, Helium Operator Economics — Bytetree - 2024-03.