Helium project https://www.helium.com/lorawan IIRC it had a lorawan component and a 5G component. You had to buy their bridge/gateway and connect them to the internet. Then you got paid on (mined) something resembling check-ins from LoRa devices, multiplied by how 'underserved' that area was.

Then of course people were creating hacked clients that were capturing like 99% of the Helium coin or whatever it was.

Honestly, I'm not even sure it is a bad idea and they may have resolved some of the concerns by now. It seems like a good way to incentivize people to deploy and maintain the gateways.