Helium launched an international expansion into Brazil in December 2025 through a joint venture with local provider Mambo WiFi, tapping an existing base of 40,000 hotspots. The move targets a market where over 100 million people still rely heavily on shared or public Wi-Fi and positions Helium as a significant DePIN entrant in Latin America.
Tokenized incentives for Brazilian connectivity
The venture converts Mambo WiFi’s installed hotspots into revenue-generating nodes inside Helium’s tokenized economy. Hotspot operators are paid in HNT tokens based on the volume of mobile data offloaded through their nodes, turning existing retail and public Wi-Fi assets into recurring crypto-denominated income streams while reducing the capital intensity of new network buildouts. Helium already captures roughly 60% of the DePIN market’s average fee income, a metric cited as evidence of the economic scale the project seeks to replicate in Brazil.
The Brazilian deployment relies on Helium Plus, a software upgrade that allows existing Wi-Fi routers to join the Helium network without wholesale hardware replacement. This software-led integration lowers the barrier to participation, accelerates coverage and routes transaction and reward settlement through the Solana blockchain, which Helium adopted in April 2023 to support high-throughput, low-latency microtransactions for DePIN operations. Typical technical challenges remain around interoperability across heterogeneous Wi-Fi hardware and maintaining consistent quality of service across distributed nodes, with Helium’s prior U.S. QoS monitoring experience presented as the operational template for Brazil.
The expansion frames a direct challenge to incumbent carriers by offering a decentralized path for mobile data offload and coverage densification. Major Brazilian telecoms could use Helium-backed offload to reduce operating expenditure, while local businesses gain an additional revenue channel, even as the project navigates regulatory complexity stemming from prior U.S. SEC action on HNT and Brazil’s telecommunications and digital-asset rules. Mambo WiFi’s established local relationships are described as critical to both compliance and execution.
Helium’s Brazil entry converts an existing public-Wi-Fi footprint into a token-incentivized network designed to scale rapidly through software-enabled integration. For traders and crypto treasuries, key monitoring points include HNT reward flows, network deployment performance and the evolving regulatory environment as indicators of whether the Brazilian rollout translates into sustained network utility and demand.