Sep 22, 2022 Frank Stewskid

Helium switches to the Solana blockchain

Helium, a distributed wireless network, decided to migrate to Solana, adopting a dedicated governance proposal, HIP 70. On September 22, the project's community voted to do so, with 81% in favor. So far, Helium has relied on its own blockchain "built from the ground up to incentivize the creation of decentralized, public wireless networks," as per Helium documentation.

The proposal was mentioned first about a month ago on GitHub, explaining the motivation behind it. As the team claims, Helium cannot meet the demand of current and future users due to the fast-paced growth it has seen since the launch of the project. However, the scaling problem can be fixed by moving Helium’s tokens, applications, and governance to Solana, resulting in efficient transactions and better interoperability and allowing the team to focus on the problem rather than managing the blockchain itself. 

Switching to the new blockchain will bring new updates to the ecosystem: HNT, MOBILE, and IOT tokens will still exist in the project's ecosystem and be issued on the Solana network, a new version of the Helium Wallet App will be available, HNT holders will be able to use Solana wallets like Phantom and Solflare. 

Although, not everyone is benefiting from this proposal. Validator stakers, staking pool operators, and validator-as-a-service providers will not earn any yield on their staked HNT any more. Nevertheless, the team expects them to participate in the project governance.

Author:

Frank Stewskid

Frank Stewskid

Last updated: Sep 22, 2022

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