Helium’s Case for Clear Rules with the CLARITY Act

On Friday, July 17, I testified before the House Financial Services Committee's Subcommittee on Digital Assets in support of the CLARITY Act, the market structure bill that would draw a clear line between digital assets that function as investments and tokens that power working networks.

My argument was clear: without that line, we are setting this industry and companies like Helium up to fail, and not in the abstract. The failure lands on the builders trying to comply, on the communities served by what they build, and on the country's ability to keep innovators building here. The Helium Network’s recent history shows exactly what is at stake.

Crypto mythology vs. crypto reality 

When people hear "crypto company," many picture a Wild West: speculation, volatility, all risk and no accountability. Here is what I asked the Committee to picture instead: wireless access points, deployed in communities across America, providing real coverage to real people every day.

The Helium Network is a physical telecommunications infrastructure. Over 140,000 active Hotspots, deployed not by a carrier spending billions on capex, but by individuals, businesses, and property operators who installed equipment and connected it to the internet service they already had. Nova Labs operates in all fifty states, with an FCC authorization for interstate and international service. Carriers, including T-Mobile and AT&T, use the network to carry traffic for millions of their subscribers daily.

Blockchain is the technology that makes this coordination possible. It verifies that each Hotspot is actually delivering the coverage it claims, without a central intermediary checking the work. And the token, HNT, is the incentive mechanism: when a Hotspot moves data for a carrier subscriber, the protocol automatically compensates the deployer based on measured volume and quality of service. No company decides who gets paid. The protocol does.

The network has already proven itself

I did not ask the Committee to take this on faith. The record is verified fact.

When Hurricane Helene knocked out 80 percent of cell towers in the hardest-hit parts of western North Carolina, portable Helium beacons running on satellite backhaul reconnected tens of thousands of devices for residents and first responders. 

In Redondo Beach, CA, a waterfront district that draws more than a million visitors a year had gone without usable cellular coverage for years; the city enabled Helium offload on its existing Wi-Fi equipment and now connects more than 2,000 daily users, with no new hardware and no new capital spending. 

During Mardi Gras in New Orleans, community-deployed infrastructure absorbed a 550 percent cellular traffic surge. The pattern repeats at Super Bowl weekends and small-town festivals alike: when the cellular network is congested, broken, or blocked, the community-built layer carries the load.

That same infrastructure is now the basis for work I described to the Committee on two public policy problems: improving indoor 911 location accuracy, where less than one percent of wireless emergency calls today deliver a dispatchable address, and bringing affordable broadband to public housing, where the Helium Foundation is in early conversations with housing authorities in California and pursuing pilot opportunities with NYCHA.

The cost of ambiguity

Nova Labs knows the cost of unclear rules firsthand. In January 2025, the SEC sued the company, alleging that selling functional wireless hardware that distributed tokens for verified network service was an unregistered securities offering. Three months later, the Commission dismissed every one of its digital asset claims with prejudice.

Nothing about our network or our conduct changed in those three months. What changed was how the same rules were being read. When the legality of a working telecommunications network depends on who is doing the reading, that is not a regulatory framework. It is a coin flip. And while the coin was in the air, we spent years and significant resources defending claims the government ultimately abandoned. Those were resources not spent deploying Hotspots, building emergency communications capability, or expanding broadband access.

We could (barely) afford that fight. Most early-stage builders cannot. Ambiguity does not protect investors; it filters out compliant companies while leaving bad actors (who never intended to comply) untouched. The public image of this industry is understandably a Wild West because regulation remains ambiguous: the builders who want rules cannot get them, and the ones who ignore rules do not need them.

What CLARITY would fix 

The CLARITY Act addresses this directly. It would treat programmatic, automatic token distributions, the kind that compensate Helium deployers for verified service delivery, as what they are: payment for work performed on a functional network, not an investment contract. It assigns oversight accordingly, and it makes that treatment a matter of statute rather than something a company has to establish through litigation.

The House passed this bill a year ago. The infrastructure it would protect is already built, already serving millions of people, and already proving that communities can own the networks they rely on. 

Clear rules and smart regulation will only protect and strengthen this industry, not hinder it. 

Sarah Aberg is Chief Legal Officer of Nova Labs, the company that created and supports the Helium Network.