The inception of decentralized wireless networks

The development of distributed ledger technology (DLT) has introduced many novel applications, from decentralized finance to blockchain games. However, the underlying technology was primarily meant to prevent a single entity from controlling any given system. Bitcoin was conceived with the primary goal of providing a decentralized alternative for a global financial accounting system. With Ethereum, it was to create a decentralized programmable system for running autonomous smart contracts.

Over the past decade, there have been various other use cases for such decentralized networks, such as decentralized storage systems, like Arweave, Filecoin and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), and decentralized wireless (DeWi) networks such as Helium. However, the concept of using a decentralized peer-to-peer network was introduced much earlier, back in 2001, when it was used for torrenting files. The innovation of these novel use cases for decentralized networks indicates that there are more advantages to decentralized wireless networks beyond just preventing a single entity from having full control of a system.