A small town in Texas has given decentralized infrastructure its most convincing real-world evidence yet. Celina, Texas, currently the fastest growing city in the US by percentage, has integrated its existing municipal Wi-Fi network into Helium’s decentralized wireless network, and the market response has been anything but subtle.
HNT, the native token of the Helium network, rose from about $0.21 to about $0.44 after the announcement, with daily trading volume rising more than 1,000% to between $38 million and $44 million. This price action represents gains of between 73% to 130% depending on the entry point, turning a token that has been quietly grinding sideways into one of the biggest movers of the week on Solana.
Why Selena is more important than your average demo program
The city saw a population increase of 24.6% year-on-year, adding more than 12,700 new residents between July 2024 and July 2025. The integration covers key municipal sites including the public library and senior center. No new towers were needed, which is the whole point of what Helium calls “brownfield deployment.” Instead of building new infrastructure from scratch, the network is placing decentralized carrier-level offloading capabilities over existing Wi-Fi installations.
The system currently processes about 100GB of data per day across these sites.
Quiet helium expansion across the United States
The Helium network now operates across more than 42,000 locations in the United States, collectively serving more than 2.5 million users daily. The network previously secured offloading partnerships with major telecom operators, including AT&T. Helium migrated from its layer-one blockchain to Solana in April 2023, a move that provided the scalability the network needed to handle increasing user loads. The token has a circulating supply of about 186 million out of a maximum supply of 223 million, giving investors a relatively clear picture of future dilution risks.
