• Helium Foundation updates IOT and MOBILE verifiers to exclude leap year accounting from rewards.
• Telefónica and Nova Labs expand Helium Mobile Access Points, enhancing coverage in Mexico.

The Helium Foundation announced a key protocol update regarding the Leap Day Emissions Schedule Change. Protocol engineers revised the IOT and MOBILE verifiers to remove leap year accounting from reward computations. This change will take effect with the next reward epoch.

Helium Protocol Adjustments and Emissions Reduction 

The impact on incentives will be small, given the change from 366 to 365 days of emissions over the next year.

These parameters are already built into the on-chain emissions program design, so there was no need to adjust them for this year’s change. A future configuration modification will result in updated emission objectives for the next year’s halving cycle.

Furthermore, HST emissions have been reduced from 31% of total HNT emissions to 30%, as per the protocol specification. This change raised the total quantity of HNT distributed to subnetworks. It is vital to recall that an annual 1% decline is planned until the emission pool is fixed at 15% after the network’s 20th year.

As of the time of writing, the HNT token was trading at roughly $5.09, up 7.37% over the last 24 hours, making it one of CoinMarketCap’s top five gainers today.

Helium, along with Filecoin and Render Network, was named one of the top DePIN projects advancing decentralized infrastructure in our prior report. The DePIN sector has undergone growth, with over 650 new projects and a market worth of $23 billion.

Earlier this year, we revealed that Telefónica and Nova Labs have worked to integrate Helium Mobile Access Points, thereby increasing coverage in Mexico. This project, based on the OpenWifi standard, attempts to link Movistar users to the Helium Mobile Network while streamlining services.