Benefits of the collaboration between Hivemapper and Helium
Helium and Hivemapper, another fast-growing blockchain project, are working together to enhance the accuracy and reliability of geolocation in the Hivemapper network. The partnership is showcasing another outstanding application of the Helium network and could potentially lead to the creation of a larger, more accurate and flexible digital world map alternative. Before we delve into the main advantages of this collaboration, let’s clarify in more detail the two DePIN projects.
What is Hivemapper?
That’s a global, decentralized mapping network, open to everyone. It uses artificial intelligence to create maps based on the journeys people make every day. Thanks to its active community of creators, the Hivemapper network collects millions of road-level images every week.
Hivemapper was created to address several issues in the existing digital mapping projects: high business costs, uneven coverage and timeliness, data without rewards, susceptibility to censorship. To overcome these, Hivemapper offers various options. People can collect high-quality road images using car cameras, as well as play games to train artificial intelligence and improve machine learning models.
The role of Helium
As most of you already know, Helium is a blockchain-based wireless network that connects low-energy IoT devices in an energy-efficient, secure, and inexpensive way. It uses the wireless standart LoRaWAN to develop a global, distributed network of hotspots that create public, long-term wireless coverage for IoT devices. Helium is a rapidly growing network used by Fortune 500 companies and is owned and operated by the ordinary people.
The nodes in the network are called Helium hotspot miners and are usually owned and placed by individuals in their homes or offices. The hotspots “mine” a cryptocurrency, rewarding their owners for providing coverage. Thus the network is growing very fast (almost 1 million devices worldwide), aiming to provide connectivity for different IoT sensor devices.
Benefits of the partnership
Here are some of the main advantages of the collaboration of Helium and Hivemapper:
Privacy and Openness
The blockchain based projects share common values around openness, decentralization, transparency and privacy, making them ideal partners in this field. They strive to provide their users with transparency and control over their data.
Location Verification
Helium allows Hivemapper to verify the location of a car camera in two ways: through the location of the Helium access point and through the list of access points that the Hivemapper camera sees while traveling along the route. This provides additional accuracy and reliability of the location data, which is crucial for creating accurate and up-to-date maps.
Additional Layer of Validation
With Helium, Hivemapper adds another layer of validation to the mapping network. This additional layer makes the mapping process fairer, as fraudsters are not allowed among the participants, and customers can be confident in the authenticity of the images and map data.
Flexibility
Hivemapper uses Helium as one of several sources for location verification. They mainly rely for location data on satellite positioning systems like GNSS/GPS and can continue to operate without Helium coverage in places around the world.
Funding the Helium network
Funding the Helium network is an important aspect of the partnership between Hivemapper and Helium. The Hivemapper Foundation pays for accessing and using this decentralized wireless network and not the camera owners. This means that the participants can take advantage of the benefits of the Helium network without worrying about financial expenses.