Helium was founded in 2013 by Shawn Fanning, the cofounder of Napster, and Amir Haleem under the somewhat ominous name of Skynet Phase 1. In the rest of the Middle East, only the United Arab Emirates comes close to the levels of adoption seen in Lebanon, with around half that number. ![]() The Hotspotty app, which shows the state of the Helium network, records approximately 6,500 hot spots installed across Lebanon. On the Helium Explorer, a dashboard displaying the location and activity of hot spots globally, Lebanon shows as an intense constellation of luminous green dots surrounded by almost-blank space. A community of ingenious miners continues to scrape profits out of the decrepit electricity grid, and some canny speculators have even managed to recover the savings they lost in the collapse of the banking system. Stablecoin use has boomed as people attempt to circumvent a basket case of a banking system. Lebanon’s economic free fall over the past few years, combined with a relatively high degree of tech literacy and a culture of hustle, has turned the country into a crucible of sorts for testing the utility of crypto assets. ![]() Looking over the lush hillsides as the sound of a geriatric diesel engine sputters in the distance, it’s hard to imagine what “things” the little gray box might be communicating with. In return for installing and running it, Abu Daher receives a cryptocurrency called HNT. It transmits a long-range Wi-Fi signal and, in conjunction with hundreds of thousands of other hot spots, forms a global decentralized network designed for the internet of things. “Of course you need decent internet, reliable electricity, but the altitude of the position is really important.” “It’s actually one of the hardest forms of mining,” says Abu Daher, 22, an architecture graduate and operator of a crypto mining pool. A couple of wires emerge from it, snaking off across the bare concrete. He gestures at a drab gray box about the size of a takeout container. ![]() In the remote mountain village of Zaarouieh, about an hour’s drive south of Beirut, Ahmed Abu Daher stands on the roof of a half-built house overlooking a wooded valley.
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