When internet-of-things (IoT) startup Helium first announced its crypto-mining modems, sales of the devices were limited to users worldwide.The company quickly sold out of its first production run designated for the Texas capital, but now Helium is shipping units much more broadly, to 263 cities around the United States, CoinDesk has learned.Of that group, a company spokesperson said the key cities are New York, San Francisco, Boulder, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Seattle. Shipments for this next wave of hotspot production should begin in October. To recap , Helium is a network meant to help IoT devices like e-scooters, simple sensors and pet trackers get low-volume data to the internet quickly and at very low cost. At-home Helium hotspots mine helium tokens by performing tasks useful to the network, such as verifying the location of nodes, the sequence of data and the location of devices sending data over the network. Companies that want to transmit data using Helium hotspots must pay with a second token, data credits, which can only be obtained by burning helium. In other words, by rewarding people for setting up these $495 hotspots and connecting them to the internet, the system gives people an incentive to deploy the network on Helium’s behalf, rather than forcing the company to sort out its own footprint.