Helium expands to Brazil with Mambo WiFi in a DePIN breakthrough via a December 2025 joint announcement that leverages roughly 40,000 existing hotspots to accelerate rollout and coverage. The move targets tokenized incentives that convert local WiFi hosts into revenue-generating network participants earning HNT while positioning Helium as a decentralized carrier-offload layer in a high-demand market.
DePIN rollout, incentives and regulatory considerations in Brazil
The alliance pairs Helium’s decentralized wireless model with Mambo WiFi’s field footprint to enable rapid coverage without full greenfield builds. Hosts in Brazil will earn HNT tokens for sharing bandwidth and operating hotspots, a mechanism that has previously produced real-usage payouts of up to $30 per day under Helium’s WiFi push, supported by a $50 million deployer grant that reduces operational friction for large-scale hotspot rollouts.
Helium completed a strategic migration to the Solana blockchain in April 2023, enabling low-cost, high-throughput settlement suitable for micro-payments to hotspot operators. Mobile-token emissions ended on January 15, 2025, simplifying rewards so participants now receive HNT directly, while the network’s existing footprint of more than 120,000 hotspots across the U.S. and Mexico and commercial integrations with AT&T and Movistar provide operational precedent for hybrid deployments that combine decentralized hosts with incumbent infrastructure.
A company statement captured the partnership’s intent: “Our 40,000 access points will serve as a foundation for the Helium Network, enabling local carriers to adopt this people-powered model,” said Katie Angelo Pierozzi, co-founder and CEO of Mambo WiFi. The collaboration is explicitly positioned as an on-ramp for Brazilian carriers to test a people-powered coverage model without incurring the capital costs of traditional network expansion.
DePIN is a model that uses tokenized incentives to compensate individuals who provide real-world network resources. The broader DePIN market currently shows an aggregate capitalization of about $32 billion, with bullish forecasts projecting growth to $3.5 trillion by 2028 and Helium historically accounting for roughly 60% of the market’s average weekly fee income, figures that frame both the economic opportunity and the scale of incentives required to sustain operator participation.
Technically, the Brazil plan depends on Passpoint-enabled hardware and WiFi offloading to allow carriers to shift traffic onto Helium-connected hotspots, reducing congestion and operating costs. Regulatory complexity remains a material risk, as spectrum access, device approvals and local telecommunications rules in Brazil will require careful compliance, and while the SEC’s dismissal of enforcement action against Nova Labs in 2025 supports a utility-token framing for HNT, it does not eliminate country-specific licensing or consumer-protection requirements.
Helium’s partnership with Mambo WiFi tests whether its incentive-driven model can scale in a major emerging market while integrating with incumbent carriers. Success would validate deployment economics and inform future token emission and reward strategies, while failure would highlight sustainability constraints and regulatory limits for DePIN-based carrier offload.