# Helium paid him \~$500k for a $300 box — why Akash is pre-incentives

- **Speaker:** Greg Osuri
- **Attribution:** attributed
- **Said:** 2024-03-19
- **Theme:** Crypto & DePIN — https://www.gregosuri.com/predictions/crypto-depin/
- **Source:** Decentralizing AI: Compute Protocols and Proof of Work - Panel Discussion \| Proof of Data 2024 (Recall Network)
- **Watch at:** 00:21:28 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUoePJrzyDQ&t=1288s
- **Canonical:** https://www.gregosuri.com/predictions/crypto-depin/2024-03-19-helium-paid-him-500k-for-a-300-box-why-akash-is-pr-3c7c/
- **Cite as:** Greg Osuri, "Helium paid him \~$500k for a $300 box — why Akash is pre-incentives," Decentralizing AI: Compute Protocols and Proof of Work - Panel Discussion \| Proof of Data 2024 (Recall Network), 19 Mar 2024, 00:21:28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUoePJrzyDQ&t=1288s

## Quote — verbatim

> I was the early Helium miner in 2019 — I bought a device for about $300 and I minted enough tokens to be worth about half a million dollars in about a year's time. I'm the wrong type of person to be incentivized... that's why it's very challenging to design incentives. Akash is pre-incentives — the reason we have not launched incentives even though we have a huge budget is because incentive design is extremely, extremely hard.

## Context — site annotation, not spoken

Agreeing with Ben's warning that proxy incentives get gamed; crypto is "phenomenal for incentives, at the same time very, very wasteful."