The unbundled cellular industry

Internet from anyone, anywhere, in 5 seconds.

Tap a @handle. Your phone is online — paid by the gigabyte to the human standing 20 feet away. iPhone ↔ Android, BLE-discovered, WiFi-delivered, Veritas-metered, Loadit-settled. No carrier. No SIM. No app required.

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The hidden tax of carriers

Carriers' cost to serve 1 extra GB on an existing tower is essentially $0. They charge $10–$15. International roaming is the worst extraction in modern consumer life — $50B/yr globally, paid almost entirely by travelers desperate enough to text family.

Meanwhile every smartphone has a hotspot built in, sitting idle. The economics flip the moment one phone can sell GBs to another. That has never been possible before because nobody had the four primitives — handle identity, programmable money, attested metering, and cross-platform discovery — in a single stack.

What we replace

International roaming

$50B/yr

Carrier roaming charges abroad. Locals share for $3/GB instead of your carrier's $15.

Travel eSIM apps

$5B/yr

Airalo + Holafly + Nomad. Identity-credentialed P2P beats prepaid blocks of bytes.

Mobile hotspot devices

$3B/yr

Skyroam, Solis, Verizon Jetpack. Every existing phone replaces the puck.

MVNO data plans

$1.7T global

The marginal cost of the next GB belongs to the user, not the carrier. We let users capture it.

The bootstrap (no internet, no app)

A guest with zero connectivity and no Hylaq app can still onboard in under 60 seconds. Every host phone broadcasts two SSIDs — the paid one and a free Hylaq-Setup captive portal that whitelists hylaq.com.

STEP 1 · Connect

Phone discovers Hylaq-Setup WiFi. Captive portal opens to hylaq.com/hotspot/connect — the only domain reachable on this network.

STEP 2 · Pay

Apple Pay or Google Pay tops up Loadit ($5–$50). @handle minted in 30 seconds with biometrics. Spend pre-authorized for the session.

STEP 3 · Pair

BLE handshake passes WiFi credentials securely. Phone auto-switches from Hylaq-Setup to the host's paid SSID.

STEP 4 · Use it

Full LTE/5G speed. Both phones independently sign metering reports every 30s. Disconnect anytime — pay only for bytes used.

The 40-year arc

Year 1
Travelers + festivals
50 hosts seeded in Lisbon, Mexico City, Bangkok. International travelers + festival-goers hit the wedge first. Average host earns $30–$200/day passive.
Years 2–4
Coverage in 100 cities
10K+ hosts globally. Hylaq Hotspot becomes the default fallback when carriers fail (stadiums, dead zones, foreign trips). Per-MB micro-revenue at scale: $50M+ ARR on take rate alone.
Years 5–8
Native MVNO + mesh routing
Bulk wholesale data buy from T-Mobile and Vodafone. Multi-hop mesh routing where guests can't reach a tower but can reach a peer who can. Hylaq becomes a hybrid carrier. $500M+ ARR.
Years 9–15
The post-cellular default
Starlink Direct-to-Cell + 6G + crowdsourced peers commoditize spectrum. Users pick their connectivity moment-by-moment via @handle reputation, not 24-month contracts. $5B+ ARR; carriers become dumb pipes.
Years 16–40
Connectivity as a peer market
Every device — phones, drones, IoT, cars, ARglasses — buys bytes the way they buy electricity. Hylaq Hotspot is the meter. The substrate the next $1T of network economics runs on.

Why only Hylaq

@handle solves the cold-start auth problem

Every previous P2P-WiFi project (Karma, Helium Mobile, FreedomPop) failed because guests with no internet couldn't log in or pay. With @handle pre-loaded plus a captive-portal fallback, that chicken-and-egg evaporates.

Cross-platform native — iPhone ↔ Android

AirDrop is iOS-only. WiFi sharing is fragmented. Bluetooth tethering is buried. We're the first protocol where iPhone and Android share internet identically through standard BLE GATT + WiFi credential exchange.

The whole stack collapses to one protocol

Veritas signs metering reports (no MITM). FROST secures session keys (no man-in-the-middle). Loadit settles per-MB in real USD via FedNow (no shitcoin). Mesh routes through peers when towers fail. Nobody else has all five primitives in one codebase.

Hosts get paid in real USD, instantly

Helium paid in HNT — illiquid, taxable, confusing. Karma was a closed loop. Hylaq pays hosts via FedNow next-day, denominated in their local currency, into the same Loadit balance their @handle already uses.

Shipped today

4 Prisma models — HotspotHost, HotspotSession, HotspotSessionEvent, HotspotPayout
3 enums — HotspotHostStatus, HotspotSessionStatus, HotspotPayoutStatus
5 lib modules — pricing math, geohash discovery, host lifecycle, session state machine, bearer-token auth
7 API routes — host upsert, host heartbeat, public discovery, session create, session GET, session heartbeat, session end
Settled-bytes invariant — guest never charged for bytes their phone didn't see; host paid only for delivered bytes
Auto-cutoff — pre-auth ceiling, host per-session cap, and discrepancy >50MB all auto-end the session
5 consumer pages — landing, host onboarding/dashboard, guest discovery, live session, captive-portal connect

Cellular got unbundled. The carriers don't know yet.

Connectivity is the last consumer utility still priced like it's 1998. Hylaq Hotspot is the bytes-by-the-byte alternative that's shippable today.

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