🤝 Join Our New Community

GM, happy Friday! Matt here.

It’s time to pull back the curtain on something we’ve been working on for a while: a hub for the people actually building distributed infrastructure.

After Helium shut down (then brought back) their Discord, we noticed the stark lack of neutral spaces for deployers, founders, and distributed hardware network contributors to connect with one another, share their experiences, and distill their knowledge.

That changes today.

The Relay community is live. We've curated what has already become one of the largest Discords for distributed infrastructure in the world.

Join here today and tune in for our flagship Community Call @ 7pm EDT / 4pm PDT on Wednesday, June 24th.

Now, let’s dive into the latest and greatest from last week. 👓

🛰️ On the Radar

Here's what we're getting into this week:

📡 We opened a neutral, cross-network community, and it's filling up fast.

🧰 What actually makes a builder? Omar Henry has a few thoughts.

🛸 FliteGrid's first AMA dropped real answers for anyone weighing a deployment.

🎈 Helium swapped CEOs, sold its phone business, and proposed changes via a new HIP.

Time to break it down. 🕺

📡 The Relay - Founder Spotlight

A room is only as good as the people in it, and ours is already full of operators who’ve figured it out the hard way.

Meet Omar Henry.

Omar didn’t get his start in crypto. He came from the traditional business world. Banker, financial adviser, built and sold a trucking company. So when he started placing hotspots, he didn't think like a hobbyist, but like a businessman.

The focus wasn’t on quick profits or moon shots. He didn't chase the big venues. He went after the businesses inside them. As he’ll tell you, you don’t need a deal with Walmart to build a sustainable business in distributed infrastructure. Omar went to the barbershop inside the Walmart. The same logic applies to airports, malls, and stadiums. 

That small shift built a book of business few can rival. Decentralized LLC, Omar’s company, now offloads hundreds of terabytes of data a month across the United States.

Sure, the strategy is easy enough to copy. The hard part is all the small steps within it.

How do you write a host contract that actually protects you? What do you do with your revenue, leave it in tokens or convert to stablecoins? When do you rebalance that revenue allocation?

All of this is unglamorous. But Omar’s long-term perspective and foundational approach have allowed him to grow his distributed infrastructure business sustainably. It’s also spared him the worst of the recent fallout happening with Helium. 

Those are the hard-earned, expensive lessons. They get a lot cheaper when someone else has already paid for them.

Where can you find Omar?

In the new Relay community Discord, where he’s joined us in building the leading community for distributed infrastructure. It’s the best place to see Omar’s playbook in action - one that took him years to refine and curate.

🎙️ Get more insights from our broadcast on our X Page, and join the community here.

🔊 Signal Boost

A few more stories worth your radar — and one, fittingly, about a network that helps you find your spot:

🛸 FliteGrid ran its first community AMA, and it was refreshingly straight. The barrier to get in the production queue is now just a $50 deposit, and a hex-value map drops in the next couple of weeks, so you can scout exactly what a location is worth before you buy. Best part: rewards track your coverage and uptime, not how many drones you detect. It’s built so it can't be gamed. Demand-honest design. We like to see it.

🎈 Helium had a heavy week. Amir Haleem stepped down as Nova Labs CEO into the chairman seat, handing the reins to new CEO Mario Di Dio right after the company sold Helium Mobile to Noble Mobile. Di Dio held a fireside chat to field the questions, and with the August 1 halving about to cut HNT emissions, operators had plenty to ask.

🛰️ GEODNET picked up a marquee co-sign: Multicoin co-founder Kyle Samani pitched $GEOD as his best idea at the All-In Liquidity Summit, calling decentralized RTK the precision layer for the robot economy and pointing to real revenue with an ~80% token buyback/burn as proof it's more than a narrative. Deployers already see what Wall Street's still squinting at. 

👋 Signing Off

We started the Relay to bring the next million people into distributed infrastructure, and nobody does that alone. The room's open, it's neutral, and it's already humming.

Forward this to someone who's been deploying in the dark. Come say GM in the Discord. And follow me and Will on X for what's next.

We'll catch you next Friday! 👋