Helium is a terrible use case for cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is for money, only for money, and not for any other purpose.
Example - local taxi app (Bolt) wouldn't even let me register. I'm guessing their SMS gateway doesn't support new number ranges I've got assigned. Engineers don't give a fuck to enable my mobility. I've spent weeks trying to get on.
What doesn't work is their token. Instead of having that they could have used a whitelist of acceptable payment... eg. ETH, USDT, USDC, DAI, WBTC, BTC...
But no, they had to have their own shitcoin of course, because if they used a cryptocurrency with actual value they wouldn't be able to give themselves a bunch of it to dump on the suckers.
Cellular is power hungry, and Wi-fi is range limited.
Long range low bandwidth, that is both cheap in power and money to use, is really useful.
Cellular is a pain in the arse, expensive to miniaturise, difficult to power longterm.
https://docs.helium.com/blockchain/proof-of-coverage/
It has nowhere close to the density for this to work, and there's nothing to stop the Beaconer and Witness from being the same person.
If the goal is to enable renting out of WiFi, then the sensible thing is to make a system that automates payment in ETH/USDT/USDC/DAI/BTC/etc... Or to put it another way, use the money cryptocurrency that exists and works already. But no, that was never the point of this. The point of Helium is to mint and dump the shitcoin.