Helium CEO Amir Haleem quits after HNT tanks 96%

Helium’s HNT token is down 96%, and CEO Amir Haleem decided to quit yesterday. He spent over a decade talking about the reasons someone should be bullish about HNT.

Checking the chart, they would have been better off never listening to him.

Helium issued three crypto tokens, MOBILE, IOT, and HNT, to incentivize operators of its once-faddish networking devices. Over the past five years, those three tokens have declined 76%, 87%, and 96%, respectively.

Haleem announced his resignation by quote-tweeting a video by his replacement, Mario Di Dio. He’s stepping aside as chief executive of Nova Labs, the company behind Helium. 

On X, some users framed his step-down to chairman as well-deserved break after a successful career. However, the price chart of his token tells an entirely different story.

Somehow, things got even worse as his reign ended, with HNT falling another 15% on the day of his goodbye.

The timing of the CEO changeover certainly raises eyebrows.

Two days before quitting, Haleem’s company offloaded its consumer business on June 2, 2026. Helium Mobile, the budget cellphone service that gave the project a sliver of legitimacy, went to Noble Mobile. 

HNT failed to rally on the news, remaining down 30% over the past week and down 46% over the past month.

So, the sequence reads cleanly. After offloading the consumer business with no relief rally to speak of in HNT, the CEO resigned two days later.

As he left, he made sure to assure everyone that he still holds HNT.

He also left behind a project that spent years collecting controversies.

Helium raised nearly $365 million over its lifetime, with FTX as one of its backers. In 2022, the company was caught advertising Lime, Salesforce, and Nestlé as network users, even though none of them were. A Forbes investigation later found that insiders had mined close to half of all HNT in its first months.

Read more: SEC wants to settle with Ripple, drops Helium case

The Gary Gensler-led SEC eventually noticed. It sued Nova Labs in January 2025 over “materially false and misleading statements” about Lime, Nestlé, and Salesforce supposedly relying on the network, among other complaints.

After Gensler resigned and Donald Trump’s replacement, Paul Atkins, took over the SEC, that case settled abruptly by April 2025. 

Nova Labs paid a mere $200,000 civil penalty over one misrepresentation charge. The SEC dismissed the rest of its complaint with prejudice under Atkins’ staggeringly crypto-accommodative “leadership.”

Haleem treated the outcome as exoneration. He called it what “might well be the shortest-lived SEC litigation on record” and the original suit “a bizarre last-minute politically-motivated move.”

He thanked the agency’s new commissioners for “restoring sanity to the commission.”

Haleem’s colorful background helps explain his tone. He lists himself as someone who likes to “build and race 90s Japanese sports cars” and launched a professional racing team during Helium’s worst-performing years.

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