Helium’s Founder, Amir Haleem has come forward to clear some air in its recent Lime and Salesforce controversy by saying that the firm had a verbal confirmation with the teams the firm worked with to ‘publicize and highlight’ the activities.
The clarification came after reports of Helium caught lying about working with firms like Lime and Salesforce started doing rounds.
The Founder of Helium clarified in a Twitter thread, “we spent a lot of time working with the brands mentioned in some of the stories last week. months and months of trials, experiments, prototyping, sales engineering. we had verbal approvals with the teams we worked with to publicize and highlight these engagements”.
Haleem wrote that some of the anonymous users on the network remain unknown to the firm due to the nature of a permissionless network that is available to all. Because all of the work is visible on-chain (not who or what), Helium doesn’t know when users stop using the network.
Haleem further elaborated that the company doesn’t have any commercial relationships with institutions/entities using the network. He added that Helium only ‘evangelize’ the network to entities to help them develop applications and hence, Helium lacks perfect visibility into when sensors are on/off, or trials starting/stopped.
But possibly after the aforementioned controversy, Helium seems to have realized that as time goes on personnel change, and ‘verbal approvals simply aren’t good enough’.
Haleem added that the firm is working with Helium Foundation to update the ecosystem page in order to only reflect companies that Helium believes are active.
In what seems like an ‘eye-opening revelation’ Helium would now work with written approvals to keep the current going forward, according to Haleem.
A spokesperson for the company wrote to The Crypto Times, “Since the Network launched in 2019, we’ve worked with a variety of companies on various applications and pilots.”
The official added, “In the case of the brands mentioned in recent articles, we had approvals to talk about the use cases but we’re going to be much more rigorous now about the logo approval process going forward to avoid any confusion. Both Nova and our partner the Helium Foundation have removed the reference.”
