When I first searched for a Heleum review back in November 2017, I couldn’t find a single one. This was not hugely surprising, since the Heleum app was just about to conclude its beta stadium, but it made it hard to tell whether Heleum is a scam or legit. So I did what every entrepreneur would do: I tried it. And to ensure you’re not as clueless as I was back then, here are my experiences with Heleum.
Note: Since Heleum is a very new app, I will constantly update this review. I will also regularly publish my Heleum earnings (or losses), so you can base your decision whether to join the AI investment app or not on real life figures. You can find my Heleum income reports further down.
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What Is Heleum?
Heleum is a free, automated currency exchange trading app powered by artificial intelligence, currently achieving about 5% profit per month. It was invented to automate investing in cryptocurrencies as part of your long-term investment strategy. As it’s a new and exciting concept, I wrote this comprehensive Heleum review to help you decide whether Heleum is a scam or legit, and whether you’d like to give it a shot or not.
Heleum’s long-term vision is to develop a suite of financial apps for the average consumer that removes the need for any trading, programming, or cryptocurrency experience. Their current mission is to bring cryptocurrency investment automation to the masses.
Heleum automatically exchanges all kinds of currencies in your Uphold account, including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, LiteCoin, Dash and Ethereum, to maximize profits. The only way Heleum itself makes money is when you make money, since profits are shared fifty-fifty. If you don’t make money, they don’t make money, so they are very interested in making you money.
The cryptocurrency investment automation’s trading frequency ranges from a few trades per week to multiple trades a day. You cannot influence the trading frequency, nor can you stop the trades, which is exactly the point. By automating cryptocurrency trading with artificial intelligence, Heleum takes the emotion and irrationality of human traders out of the equation, and solely relies on sophisticated algorithms.
A Short History Of Heleum
The concept of Heleum was brainstormed in November 2015 by the brothers Pace and Taylor Ellsworth as well as their colleague Dan Pratt.
The project became operational one month after its inception, the domain name ‘www.heleum.com’ was registered on August 19, 2016.
After testing and improving various algorithms and increasing their automated cryptocurrency trading profits from 2% per month to 5% a month, Pace, Taylor and Dan founded Heleum LLC in April 2017 in Mesa, Arizona.
The official launch party took place on November 1, 2017, in Phoenix. The PR announcement of the launch followed on November 16, the beta testing phase ended on November 22.
On May 16, 2018, Heleum released its much anticipated version 2.0, after “over 5,000,000 hours of simulations with over 40,000 balloons”, to quote the Heleum team.
Heleum’s version 2.0 promises better money management, better market timing, better handling of balloon pop gains as well as improved crash handling (incl smart stop losses).
How To Set Up An Heleum Account To Begin Automated Cryptocurrency Investment
Setting up an Heleum account is surprisingly easy. All you need is an Uphold account (which is free and very useful), then authorize the app Heleum to access your Uphold account. You can then decide how much of your Uphold money you want the Heleum app to play with, then lean back and let the algorithms automatically invest your money into cryptocurrencies for you.
Note: In case you don’t fully trust Heleum (and you should never trust any company 100%), only transfer as much money to your Uphold account as in the worst case you are willing to sacrifice. Once authorized, Heleum has extensive rights over your Uphold account. Be aware of that.
How Does Heleum Work?
To use their language, Heleum floats ‘balloons’. Each balloon equates to a certain amount of money, which is then fully automatically traded into various fiat and crpytocurrencies. (Please note that Heleum predominantly invests in cryptocurrencies.)
A balloon can launch between 2.50 USD and 2,500 USD. It stays afloat for about 7-90 days, during which the currency may be traded dozens or even hundreds of times, before it automatically ‘pops’.
Heleum aims at popping all balloons at a gain of between 5-10%. Either because they love you so much, or because they keep 50% of all gains, and hence wouldn’t earn anything if balloons popped at a loss.
The beauty is: Once you authorized Heleum to access your Uphold account, and determined how much money Heleum shall play with, you can go and fully concentrate on swinging in the hammock at Coconut Beach. You don’t have to monitor anything, and, even if you wanted, you cannot influence the trades. So just relax, and focus on the crashing of the waves.
Does Heleum Cost Anything? How Does It Make Money?
Heleum is completely free of charge to use. The app makes money by making you money. All profits are equally split fifty-fitty, which is fair. They provide the technology, you provide the financial investment, and both parties profit.
The good news are: If you don’t make money, they don’t make money, hence they’ll do everything to maximize your profits. And ‘everything’ for AI programmers is quite a lot.
In case you begrudge Heleum their 50% share, get your friends to use the app as well. When signing up to Heleum you automatically receive a referral link, which you can send to friends, family and Facebook folks. For every referred friend who is active for more than 30 days you’ll get to keep an extra 1% of the profits (up to 40 friends).
Update Dec 2017: As a Christmas present, Heleum has added a new way to further increase your profit share: Simply invest more money. For simply having money in your account, you’ll receive one additional percent of the profit. If you invest more, the boost rises as follows:
- 5% for users with over $1,000 invested.
- 10% for users with over $10,000 invested.
- 15% for users with over $100,000 invested.
- and 20% for users with over $1,000,000 invested.
Want to give it a try? Join Heleum today. It’s completely free.
How Much Money Can I Make With Heleum?
Heleum states that since its inception in December 2015, they generated about 2% profit per month with fully automated cryptocurrency investments. From March 2017 to December 2017, they increased this to about 5% per month. That’s a 150% increase in profit within a year and a half. Or, breaking it down, it’s doubling algorithm profits within one year. Hoorray to artificial intelligence.
This supposed increase was my main motivation to join. If they can double the profits within their first year of operation, why shouldn’t they be able to replicate this success and keep doubling their (and now my) profits every year?
What to do with all the money? Go travel and plant trees!
As I started using Heleum in December 2017, you don’t have to rely on their website’s claims any longer, but can simply bookmark this Heleum review and come back regularly to check out actual real-life growth (or loss) here:
- Heleum Income Report December 2017. 30% up & the Christmas Crash.
- Heleum Income Report January 2018. Not so Happy New Year.
- Heleum Income Report Februrary 2018. Best month to date.
- Heleum Income Report March 2018. Down and down and down we go.
- Heleum Income Report April 2018. Over 50% increase. Making February look like an amateur.
- Heleum Income Report May 2018. The most valuable report to date, including a comparison against the Bitcoin market performance.
Heleum Cons
There are of course a few cons to Heleum that any decent Heleum review should make you aware of before you start throwing all your savings at them.
Trading Frequency
One disadvantage of Heleum is that you cannot influence the automated trading frequency. The currency exchange fees Uphold charges for every trade eat into the profits. A simple option to choose between ‘frequent trades’ and ‘not-so-frequent trades’ could already help to ease the pain.
Then again, Uphold offers excellent exchange rates and very fair fees. And usually Heleum generates more than enough profit to make up for these fees.
Extensive Uphold Rights
Another con to Heleum are the extensive rights to your Uphold account you have to grant the app. As a fairly new program it is hard to decide whether to trust the program or not. As with all investments, you should never invest more than you are comfortable with losing. Invest a bit of money to start with, then increase the amounts as you gain confidence.
Heleum Is Young
One fact that evokes different opinions is the newness of the app. Some call Heleum a scam for being new, others embrace the innovation and see the potential behind it. Even ScamAdviser isn’t quite sure what to make of the site yet, as ratings fluctuate between 68% and 86%. Deductions are mainly made for ‘being new’.
Being new is fine. We all had to start at some point. As a startup marketing advisor, I love to give newbies a shot. The one thing to keep an eye out though is the domain expiration date, which currently is August 19, 2018. Fingers crossed they decide to exist longer than that. I’ll keep this Heleum review updated.
Read More: Build your own website in 2 simple steps
and: 9 ways to make money online with your website
FDIC-Insurance And The Motion Of Confidence
One last word of advice: Please be aware that Heleum is not FDIC-insured, and is not a financial services company. However, your money technically remains in your Uphold account, Heleum’s app only moves it around during the automated cryptocurrency trades. You can withdraw your money from Uphold at any time.
Uphold has moved over 2bn USD since its inception and is still the world’s most transparent digital money platform. If you don’t trust them, you shouldn’t trust any financial institution. (Which, in fact, is a sensible idea.)
Is Heleum Crisis Proof?
As we all learned in our humble past as investors: There were crisis, there are crisis, and there always will be crisis. Some are bad, some are worse. At least for the majority of investors.
On the other hand, during every crisis there are people turning filthy rich, seemingly overnight, since they speculated on this crisis to happen. Yes, there are also thousands of people going bankrupt every day while waiting for a crisis which refuses to happen, but that’s a different story.
Fact is: Every crisis offers room for gain.
Why Crisis Become Crisis – Short Form
Crisis often become a lot worse than they’d need to be due to human emotions. Let’s say the stock market crashes. That’s as simple as a couple of stocks losing value, for whichever reason. People see their stocks falling, freak out and sell. That further decreases the value of the stocks, and there’s your crisis.
How To Profit From Crisis (Hint: Try Heleum)
On the other hand, there are cold blooded investors who speculated on this. They sold their stocks when they peaked, watch everyone freak out and then buy in again at rock-bottom prices. Then they go and buy another yacht and sail across the seven seas. You may see them from your hammock at Coconut Beach.
Simple and solid strategy. If you have the balls and a blood temperature close to zero. Kelvin.
Most people don’t. That’s why they sell when their stocks go down. Which is not necessarily the smartest moment.
Heleum does. It actually doesn’t have any blood temperature at all, since it’s all algorithms moving your money around. Hence Heleum can profit from crisis, by making clever investments automatically while most humans panic and act irrational. It trades with currencies and not with stocks, but in terms of human irrationality and crisis potential, that’s basically the same thing.
This certainly doesn’t make Heleum crisis-proof. No investment in this world is. But it does make the app potentially quite crisis-resilient. That’s the best thing to aim for when planning long term investments.
Update Jan 2018: Crisis hit the crypto market for Christmas. Heleum failed. Details in my Heleum Income Report from December 2017.
Update Mar 2018: Despite cryptos heavily losing value again, Heleum clings to them. And it’s part of the plan. When asked on Facebook, Pace commented improvements are in the pipeline, but weren’t part of the original algorithm, as nobody foresaw an 80% drop in cryptocurrency prices. Fair point.
The perfect algorithm between fiat and crypto investing to maximise gains has yet to be developed. And the Heleum team is working on it. Heleum version 2.0 is underway (to be launched in May, according to their Roadmap). Save this Heleum review in your bookmarks and check back for updates at least once a month. Or subscribe to my newsletter, and I’ll shoot you an email whenever there are exciting news to share.
Is Heleum Trustworthy?
Heleum is a US LLC registered in Arizona. That’s a lot better than Panama, but as a German I’m by nature not allowed to trust US companies.
Despite never having met them in person, it seems there are real people behind Heleum, who are not afraid to show their faces. That’s always a good sign.
You can stalk Pace Ellsworth on Facebook and LinkedIn or watch him give a speech during the launch event on YouTube. His brother Taylor, co-founder and CTO of Heleum, also appeared on stage and is on Facebook. And here is Dan Pratt’s Facebook.
How Can I Contact Heleum?
If you want to contact the Heleum team, send an email to info [at] heleum.com. Positive: My tickets are usually resolved within about 10 minutes. Good work!
Heleum Review Conclusion
Despite the cons, Heleum is an exciting and innovative app which I definitely recommend checking out.
Update May 2018: You may want to read my Heleum Income May 2018 vs Bitcoin market performance report first before investing. Currently, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend to invest a lot of money with Heleum. — end of update —
If you are unsure, you can start by investing amounts as little as 5 USD. Agreed, the growth rate is unlikely do duplicate BitCoin’s, so you won’t get rich by investing 5 USD.
But that also isn’t Heleum’s aim. The aim is steady, automated long-term growth. 5 bucks can offer you some first insights into how Heleum works. It’ll help you gain trust, and you can always add funds later.
The more money you add, the more balloons Heleum can float, and the higher your gains will be. Remember: Balloons only pop when they’re at a gain. Should they be in the reds, they’ll remain afloat.
Last but not least, please drop me a line in the comments below or join our Facebook discussion to share your Heleum experiences and your opinion whether you opine Heleum is a scam or legit, along with any questions you may have. Also let me know if I forgot to mention anything of value in this Heleum review.
I wish you lots of success when investing with Heleum. And, of course, also lots of success should you decide against it.
Excellent Review, thank you. I think I’ll give it a small try
Thanks Angus. Great idea with the ‘small try’, invest a little and see how it performs for you… you can always stock up later…
My experience with Heleum is horrible! I invested €735 on February 14, and a little more than one month later it remains only €386! They lost almost half the investment. I don’t think they are scammers, just they profit when cryptos rise, and lose when cryptos fall. There’s absolutely no capital protection in their system. They stayed almost all the time on falling cryptos instead of jumping on more secure fiat currencies while the crypto market was in a bloodbath. Furthermore, they pocketed huge commissions on every transaction, between 1.5 and 2%. They syphoned €95 from my account with their transaction + ‘performance’ fees. Definitely not the place to store your long term savings, as they say. Rather a highly risky immature investment vehicule.
Thanks Jean.
I fully agree, since most cryptocurrencies have dived, the past two weeks haven’t been great with Heleum, and they still need to develop ways to reap the full benefits from trading between fiat & cryptocurrency. (Feb though was my best Heleum month to date, 14% up overall.)
As for the commissions, from my understanding these are pocketed by Uphold, not by Heleum. Heleum only makes profit once they pop your balloons at a gain, so they should be very interested themselves to improve their algorithms.
Fingers crossed they’ll get a grip on this soon, then the project has a very bright future ahead.
Until they do, it’s sensible to not invest more than some gambling money. While there is a chance of massive profits when cryptos take over the world economy, there’s also always the option of losing it all.
Besides the Heleum investment, I also have some money stored on Uphold, to profit from value increases. And, of course, it’s always smart to have some money invested elsewhere…
Thanks a lot for your comment, I wondered if they were able to make money while criptos were diving, and now I see they don’t.
They just do the same thing I do, to HODL.
If I do it by myself I won’t pay the commissions, despite having the same results.
For the moment that’s certainly correct, Antonious. Only good thing is one doesn’t pay any commissions or transaction fees while Heleum HODLs, so guess we’re on par here.
Apparently stop loss algorithms will be implemented later this month / early May, which should also help profit from crypto crisis like the current one by investing more in fiat currencies… let’s see how the algorithm changes develop.
Keep in touch!
lol, what AI trading platforms loses more than my HODL strategy?
Heleum.
I did a test with $500 the first week of January. My balance in uphold is not $129.27.
I’m just glad I did a small test as the HODL strategy hasn’t lost me nearly as much. It’s as if they are afraid to move money to Fiat when cryptos are nose diving.
A strategy that only works in a bull market is not a strategy at all.
Fully agree, Trent, the past 3 months were everything but glorious for Heleum. Must admit that my HODL strategy didn’t work out any better / different, since Heleum also basically just HODLed since Jan…
CEO promised that changes will be made to the algorithm within this month, hope things will get better (can’t get much worse, haha).
I lost over 75 percent of my investment in heleum, which is worse than even the market losses if it had just been in one crypto-currency. Constantly moving in worse directions, it seems like it has no real strategy. Definitely would not recommend this.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Vilas. Fully agree, especially the past month has been everything but glorious.
Now that the money is invested already, I decided to leave it in there, and anticipate the promised changes for V 2.0 for later this month – let’s see if they can get the balloons back on track for us…
hola estoy interesado en la aplicacion como ha sido el avance los ultimos mese ahora que las principales monedas estan algo mas estables
Hi Sebastian,
last month was the best month to date, with 50% increase. The income report is here: https://ceekaiser.com/money/heleum-income-report-april-2018/
This month the market is down again, the full report will be published in the next few days. Sign up for the newsletter above, then you’ll receive the next report as soon as it’s published.
Generally it seems to go up and down, bit unpredictable. If you’re interested, sign up for it, but don’t invest too much to start with… then see how it develops and whether you feel fine with the investment or not.
I hope this helps?
Thanks for the review Chris. I started with nearly $50 in Heleum last November. I was excited to see what it could do. But, so far, all it has done is go down, down, and down some more.
Currently my account value sits at $9.37 from the nearly $50 I originally put into it.
I just don’t see why they couldn’t stick to crypto trading first before they started adding other fiat currencies into the mix. Clearly, from what I am experiencing, they have not figured out the stop losses. Much less the gains part of it.
As far as I’m concerned, it seems they bit off more than they could chew. And, I am guessing that I am not the only person in this kind of loss from Heleum.
Thanks Joe.
Yes, I fully agree with you… it seems their ambitions were noble, but over the top.
Apparently stop losses are implemented as we speak, but as added in the May update and the latest income reports, I currently cannot recommend investing with Heleum.
My portfolio is down big time as well. I’ll keep holding on to it, to see how things develop, and will keep you updated in my monthly income reports. Fingers crossed the team gets a grip on things and we’ll see an upwards trend soon.
I’ll keep you posted – thanks for your time to comment and share your experience with other readers.
Hi Chris,
Sadly – like most of the other comments on this page, my experience with Heleum hasn’t been very positive with the current market conditions. I only invested around $100 USD, and am at a 50% loss as of July 2018. I also haven’t had a balloon pop since mid June. Is this the case with you also?
Hi Victoria,
Thank you very much for your message.
Yes, unfortunately that is my experience as well – except for that I invested more money. However, not a single balloon has popped yet.
In the Facebook group some users stated they had balloons pop in April, when the market was up… let’s hope it recovers at some stage.
Until then, I wouldn’t recommend investing any more into Heleum for the time being.
Sign up for my newsletter, and I’ll keep you in the loop on how my portfolio evolves and once I recommend investing again.
Thanks Victoria!
I started with usd 500. Let’s see how it goes.
Nice one, Pravesh! Fingers crossed it goes well! Keep us in the loop about your experiences, please. Thank you!