Table Of Contents
The dream of a global, public LoRaWAN network is a powerful one. While private LoRaWAN networks thrive for specific industrial and agricultural applications, the vision of a ubiquitous, low-cost network for tracking, sensing, and connecting the physical world remains just out of reach. We’ve seen two major attempts to build this future, each a fork in the road leading to a dead end.
First came The Things Network (TTN), a noble, grassroots effort built on altruism. It did an admirable job, proving the power of a community-built network. But without a sustainable incentive model, it relied on the goodwill of gateway operators, a foundation that proved too fragile for global scale.
Then came Helium, which swung to the opposite extreme. It introduced a powerful financial incentive, unleashing a torrent of investment and energy. But as we’ve explored in this series, its venture-backed, token-driven model led to speculative frenzies, mountains of e-waste, and a degenerative trajectory towards techno-feudalism. The network’s builders became a surplus population in a system designed for extraction.
This leaves us at an impasse. One path was built on hope but lacked fuel. The other was built on hype but burned out, leaving a trail of broken promises. But what if there is a third path? Let’s tell a story of the universe next door, a world where that same powerful vision was stewarded not by volunteers or a VC-backed corporation, but by a genuine Platform Cooperative, owned and governed by the people who built it. This isn’t a fantasy; it’s a map to a future we can still create.
The Third Path: The Platform Co-op
In this alternate story, the network begins not with a pitch deck for venture capitalists, but with a constitution drafted around a digital campfire. This is the genesis of a Platform Cooperative, a business owned and governed by its members—the people who build, maintain, and use the network. Let’s call it the Public LoRaWAN Co-op. Its purpose is not to enrich a small group of founders, but to build and care for a public data network for the benefit of all its members. This is the start of a regenerative trajectory, founded on cooperative production.
There are no outsized founder shares. The initial resources are held in a community treasury, guided by a digital guild where influence is earned through contribution, not bought.
A Living Governance, For and By the People
This cooperative understands that simple one-token-one-vote systems lead to oligarchy. Instead, they weave a more resilient social fabric. People gather into circles of shared interest and expertise.
The Network Guardians are obsessed with quality and reliability. They move beyond simplistic “Proof-of-Coverage” and cultivate a more nuanced “Proof-of-Contribution.” Here, rewards flow to gateways providing verifiable value: uptime, real data transferred, and coverage confirmed by their peers. The speculative gateway farms of our world would find no purchase here; only genuine, well-placed gateways would thrive. This is a system that values human creativity and contribution, not just capital.
The Innovation Weavers are the storytellers and dreamers. A meaningful portion of the network’s revenue flows into their hands, with a mandate to ignite the demand side of the network. A consistently available public network would be a game-changer for countless industries. They grant funds to developers and startups building real-world solutions:
- Logistics and Supply Chain: Low-cost trackers for pallets, containers, and packages, providing unbroken visibility across entire transport routes.
- Cold Chain Monitoring: Ensuring vaccines, fresh food, and sensitive materials are kept at the correct temperature from farm to fork, reducing waste and ensuring safety.
- Smart Agriculture: Soil moisture sensors for regenerative farms, tracking systems for wandering livestock, and monitoring micro-climates to improve yields.
- Urban Environments: Air quality monitors for neighbourhood schools, smart waste bins that signal when they are full, and systems for monitoring public infrastructure.
The Hardware Stewards champion open, accessible technology. They don’t sell proprietary boxes. Instead, they maintain open-source firmware for a wide range of off-the-shelf gateways, lowering the barrier to entry, reducing e-waste, and ensuring the network belongs to everyone.
Weaving Networks, Not Islands
A core part of their vision is connection, not domination. They see the seeds of this future already scattered across the globe. They look at Packet Broker, a brilliant piece of infrastructure open-sourced by The Things Industries, which proved a neutral, peer-to-peer exchange for LoRaWAN traffic was possible. In our world, it was a vision that never found its fuel because the incentive models were missing.
In this world, the Co-op sees Packet Broker not as a competitor, but as a kindred spirit. They embrace it, build upon it, and design their incentive system to pour fuel on this collaborative fire. Their goal is not to be the only network, but to be the most trusted and interconnected node in a global web of networks, a true “network of networks.”
Technology as a Tool, Not a Tyrant
This cooperative also holds a different relationship with its technology. It rejects the brittle utopia of “code is law.” It understands that successful human collaboration is built on trust, nuance, and social contracts—things that cannot be hard-coded.
The distributed ledger is a powerful tool, but it is only a tool. It is the loom, not the weaver. It provides a transparent, auditable backbone for treasury management and voting, but the real work of strategy, negotiation, and relationship-building happens between people. It is a digitally-assisted human organisation, where code is the trusted servant of the community’s will, not its dictator. Here, technology is used to replace the need for meaningless labour—automating payouts, verifying data—freeing people to engage in the creative, social, and narrative work that builds a true community.
The Regenerative Cycle
Here, the locust-like chase of the next hype cycle is replaced by the patient cultivation of a sustainable ecosystem. The network’s health is measured not by speculative token price, but by the real data being used by real customers. This focus creates a powerful regenerative cycle:
- Real utility inspires real-world solutions.
- Real solutions generate real revenue.
- Real revenue funds more innovation and rewards meaningful contributions.
- More innovation creates more utility, and the cycle begins anew, stronger than before.
The people who invested their time, energy, and resources to build this network are not left with obsolete hardware. They are the respected, voting members of a thriving cooperative they genuinely own and cherish.
This story may be a glimpse into another timeline, but the principles are real and achievable. It reminds us that the promise of a decentralised future is not flawed, but the corporate, VC-fuelled model we’ve mistaken for it is. A truly regenerative path is possible, but we must build it on the fertile ground of cooperation, meritocracy, and genuine community ownership. The same technology offers us two futures: one of extraction and techno-feudalism, the other of cooperative production and shared value. The function it serves is up to us. It’s a future we can still choose to build, together.
Attribution: Image by Cogdog, CC0 1.0 Visit here
