Helium, the a16Z-backed Crypto Unicorn, Spars With Binance Over Delisting

A token created by Helium, a much-hyped crypto project hailed as one of the best use cases of Web3 technology, will be partially delisted from major cryptocurrency exchange Binance amid reports of poor revenue and misleading marketing at its parent company, as well as the network's abandonment of its native blockchain last month. From a report: In a blog post Thursday, Binance said that it would cease trading Helium Network Tokens, or HNT, with multiple trading pairs over the next week, effectively preventing token holders from exchanging HNT for Bitcoin or other tokens. Binance "strongly advised" people to close out their positions, or else it would "conduct an automatic settlement and cancel all pending orders" relating to HNT and its trading pairs on October 12. Users may continue to spot trade with the HNT/Binance USD (Binance's stablecoin, BUSD) pair.

In a statement to Forbes, Binance spokesperson Jessica Jung said the exchange periodically reviews "each digital asset we list to ensure that it continues to meet a high level of standard. When a coin or token no longer meets this standard or there are changes in the industry, we conduct a more in-depth review and potentially delist it in order to protect our users." In response, Scott Sigel, COO at the Helium Foundation, which manages the community, said in a statement to Forbes that "there is no basis for Binance to delist several HNT pairs. There has been no change to the integrity of HNT and it continues to meet all of the standards the exchange sets."

What has this world come to...

[Echoez]

... that we can longer trust the fine visionary folks behind digital currencies. For so long, everyone involved in the Binance industry has been so reputable, focused on financial security and stability. There has just been so little theft, fraud, greed, hacking, pollution or anything that we would associate with the normal finance industry.

What a sad state of affairs.

one of the best use cases

[sdinfoserv]

If crypo is one of the "best" use cases for Web3... i fart in your general direction

Re:one of the best use cases

[jythie]

The use cases do seem to be rather circular. Over and over they seem to mostly come down to 'the use of crypto is trading crypto! as long a people keep buying it you could sell your's!"

How I read this headline:

[JoeRobe]

Helium, the -backed Crypto , Spars With Over

I've accepted I just can't read headlines about crypto. I see that those are English words, but I have no idea what that sentence is even about.

Re:

[JoeRobe]

Ha, I misused brackets there and didn't preview. Let's try this again:

Helium, the [cryptobabble]-backed Crypto [cryptobabble], Spars With [Cryptobabble] Over [cryptobabble]

I've accepted I just can't read headlines about crypto. I see that those are English words, but I have no idea what that sentence is even about.

Re:

[rgmoore]

To be fair, "Unicorn" and "Delisting" are both used in the wider financial community. A "Unicorn" is a startup that's still privately held and is worth over $1 billion. At the time the term was coined, billion dollar private startups were extremely rare, so someone described them as unicorns as something else that was so rare as to be mythical. "Delisting" means something can no longer be traded on a particular exchange. Each exchange can only trade a limited number of things, and the things that are tr

Helium?

[registrations_suck]

I thought that was an element, between hydrogen and lithium.

Re:

[rossdee]

Helium ,Celsius etc
can't these people come up with original names for their companies?

Re: Helium?

[sodul]

Tell that to Apple.

Low revenue

[bradley13]

You are supposed to earn HNT by providing connectivity. Buying the hardware costs $hundreds and you have to pay to get your node added to the network. Apparently, payouts are pennies, or maybe a few bucks if you are in a lucky location. It's a sexy-sounding idea, but reality intervenes. Add to that: As I understand it, you may be effectively reselling your internet connection - which would almost certainly be a violation of your contract. HNT is supposed to be a mesh, but not all nodes are connected to all

You might be over-estimating

[angularbanjo]

how much genuine slashdotters give a flying fuck about 'crypto' / cryptobros / Ponzi schemes / scams. Things such as these have been around since the development of organised societies. It's not really about technology, it's about opportunists exploiting the gullible. While the underlying technical concepts to some of this area are really interesting, and have possibly useful applications across the board, most stories with the seo term 'bitcoin' are just about asswipes looking to extract real money from those who probably can't afford to lose it, as quickly as they possibly can, to stay ahead of the cops.

Re: You might be over-estimating

[todmanic]

Crypto already has practical uses beyond ponzi scheming and monkey 'art' scams: Tax evasion, money laundering, child porn and gun buying, kidnap and hacker payoffs and so much more. It's distributed nature makes it hard to control or suppress. So even though it's use cases are all evil it will never die, like a vampire, not like a helium unicorn.

Re:

[topologist]

I returned to Slashdot after a hiatus of several years, and noticed an apparent disconnect between the commenters, who generally tend to be 'old school' engineers skeptical of the ponzi scheme of the day, and at least a subset of the present management who appear to be ardently on the crypto bandwagon.

Slashdot's twitter account

https://twitter.com/slashdot [twitter.com]

mentions bitcoin in its 'bio' alongside Linux, and appears to pander to the likes of Musk for attention, cf.:

https://twitter.com/slashdot/s... [twitter.com]

In future Helium crypto news ...

[fahrbot-bot]

Helium ... will be partially delisted from ... Binance amid reports of poor revenue and misleading marketing ...

Company and tokens renamed "Hot Air". :-)

It's legit

[xenog]

To make vehicles that are lighter than air, which float upwards in the atmosphere, as we want our favourite cryptocurrency to do, either helium of hot air is used to fill it up. A cryptocurrency that is made of hot air is not good, but this is helium, so it has to be legitimate. It should rise and float above the others. I think I have learned to reason like a typical cryptocurrency trader. I'm going to buy helium now, and pump it into my cryptocurrency balloon.

Sometimes I wonder at all the crypto-vitriol here

[PseudoThink]

And what motivates the vitriol.

How many think that all crypto works the same way, that the only difference between one coin and the other is the name and the "angle" of the scam?

How many have personally used crypto and not been burnt by a mistake or market volatility?

How many aren't bots?

Conversely, I'm curious how many knowledgeable and/or crypto-interested people there are here, but who (like me) are usually too disinclined to be the target of others' spite to post anything in these threads, so they just

Re: Sometimes I wonder at all the crypto-vitriol h

[reanjr]

I use it. Haven't been "burnt" yet. Not to say I haven't seen volatile swings in the value, but that's to be expected with the coins I have.

On the other hand, I am super paranoid about sending cryptocurrency. Desktop clients are few and far between and mobile clients are a cesspool of fraud. I won't put money into crypto wallet on my phone until I've had the app installed for a while and I've seen it get updates and no one complaining about scams.

a16Z integer data type

[dohzer]

For anyone else wondering what the fuck "a16Z" is:

Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

Bunch of nonsense words about made up not money

[paul_engr]

Fucking stupid