Have Helium Leaders Been Lining Their Own Pockets While Not Delivering on Product?

cryptonews.com:

Executives at Helium (HNT), a developer of a "decentralized wireless infrastructure," as well as their family and friends, hoarded the majority of wealth at the project's launch, claims Forbes.

This is a $1.2 billion web3 company that said it was building a global wireless internet connection called the “People’s Network.” Helium COO Frank Mong wrote that one of the tenets of the Helium network is fairness, saying that “everyone has an equal opportunity to mine.”

But Forbes has painted a very different picture of the company – an antonym of fair.

Per its report, the People’s Network users have seen “vanishingly small crypto rewards,” claiming that,

“Helium has made a handful of people disproportionately rich: its executives and their friends.”

Lee Reiners, Policy Director at the Duke Financial Economics Center, who teaches cryptocurrency law at Duke Law, was quoted by the news outlet as saying that,

“This thing was set up to enrich the founders and early supporters at the expense of everyday people.”

Forbes claims to have reviewed “hundreds of leaked internal documents” and transaction data, and that it interviewed five former Helium employees, finding that, despite the project insiders promoting democracy and fairness, a majority of wealth generated in the earliest days of the project, when it was the most lucrative, went to these insiders.

The authors claim to have identified 30 digital wallets that appear to be connected to Helium employees, their friends, family, and early investors. These wallets show HNT 3.5 million mined, which is almost half of all tokens mined within the first three months of the network’s launch in August 2019.

Then, within six months, more than a quarter of all HNT had been mined by insiders — valued