Helium announced a strategic expansion into Brazil in December 2025 through a partnership with Mambo WiFi, marking a major step for the decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) model. The deal leverages Mambo’s roughly 40,000 hotspots to accelerate coverage in a country where more than 100 million people rely primarily on shared or public Wi-Fi, aiming to lower costs and broaden access.
People-powered connectivity and carrier offload
Helium’s entry into Brazil pairs its decentralized protocol with Mambo’s existing footprint of about 40,000 Wi-Fi access points, providing an instant deployment base rather than a ground-up build. The integration is presented as a pragmatic way for traditional carriers to offload mobile data traffic onto a hybrid ecosystem that uses community-provided Wi-Fi, reducing congestion and operating expense for incumbents while expanding local coverage.
Mario Di Dio, Helium’s general manager of network, said the partners are “tackling the telco market in Brazil and pioneering a new model where people-powered networks deliver affordable, reliable coverage at scale.” For end users and local operators, the operational implication is faster rollouts with lower capex and new recurring revenue streams for hotspot operators.
DePIN is a blockchain-based model that rewards individuals and businesses for deploying and maintaining physical infrastructure, shifting ownership and operation from centralized firms to a distributed community. Supporters highlight early economics in which the network reportedly generates between $330,000 and $370,000 per week in fees and captures roughly 60% of the DePIN market’s average fee income.
Researchers and industry observers cited in the announcement project DePIN growth of between 100–1,000x over the next decade, illustrating both potential scale and execution risk. These projections frame Brazil as a high-impact test case for whether incentive-driven infrastructure can move beyond niche deployments into mainstream connectivity markets.
The Helium Foundation positions the model as structurally cost-reducing for connectivity. Scott Sigel, the foundation’s COO, said the community network approach “makes everything cheaper,” implying that consumer plans could fall materially if the scaling strategy succeeds. Incentives are central to that thesis: Abhay Kumar, CEO of the Helium Foundation, described the network as aligning rewards between those who want connectivity and those who provide it, creating a self-reinforcing growth mechanism.
Technically, Helium now runs on Solana, a high-throughput blockchain that the foundation views as necessary to manage massive device and transaction volumes at low cost. Noah Prince, head of protocol engineering, emphasized that Solana’s scalability is a prerequisite for real-world DePIN deployments, making on-chain performance and transaction economics direct drivers of hotspot returns and offload latency.
Helium’s Brazilian launch with Mambo WiFi is designed as a live test of these assumptions in a large, connectivity-constrained market. The partnership will demonstrate whether a community-incentivized rollout can meaningfully improve access while remaining economically viable at scale for carriers, hotspot operators and token holders.
