$HNT is a gem!

I came to Helium with the simplest possible first-time question: how do I actually join this network? It took me three sites and a guess to find the answer.

1. The front door no longer leads to the product Helium is famous for. The story that reaches newcomers is "people deploy hotspots and get paid in HNT." But helium.com today is a carrier sales page: HeliumOS, Wi-Fi DAS, stadiums, grocery chains. The word "hotspot" appears nowhere on it. The Get Started button leads to a HeliumOS checkout. And the footer links to the blog, the explorer, careers... but not to docs.helium.com, where the actual individual path (buy a LoRaWAN gateway, onboard it, assert its location, earn) is documented in real detail. I only found the onboarding guide because I already knew the docs subdomain existed. A newcomer does not.

2. Which token do hosts actually earn today? The docs tokens section now lists only HNT, Data Credits, and SOL, and the HNT page says hosts are rewarded in HNT. Yet MOBILE and IOT still trade on every major tracker. Was the subDAO reward structure sunset, or is the token section stale? Either way, a newcomer comparing Helium tokens today has no official page that answers it in one sentence.

3. The halving table on the HNT page mislabels its last two rows. They read Year 7 and Year 8 again (for 2027 and 2028). The table's own arithmetic says those are Years 9 and 10: 217.5M + 7.5M = 225M at the start of 2027, then +3.75M = 228.75M for 2028. It sits on the most-visited economics page Helium has.

What works, and genuinely impresses: Data Credits. One DC = $0.00001, always. Mobile data at $0.10/GB. IoT billed per 24-byte payload increments with LoRaWAN protocol overhead excluded. $0.50 to onboard a hotspot, $0.50 to assert its location. A buyer can compute exact costs before touching a single token. That is cleaner pricing than most telecoms offer, and the docs state it plainly.

The gap is the front door, not the machine. One "For Individuals: run a hotspot" link on the homepage pointing at the onboarding docs would close the loop for the exact community the tokenomics depend on.

Question for the team: what does a hotspot host's wallet actually receive in October 2026, and could that answer live on one page a newcomer can find?