Helium Completes Upgrade to Solana, Boosting Decentralized Wireless Network | Blockster

Helium, the world's largest decentralized wireless network, has completed its upgrade to the Solana Mainnet, ushering in a new era of scalability, expansion, and reliability. The migration from the Helium blockchain to Solana provides numerous benefits such as faster transaction speeds, new smart contract capabilities, scalability, and increased reliability.

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The move will enable the Helium Foundation and other contributing organizations to direct more engineering resources towards accelerating the growth of decentralized wireless networks and bringing new applications that create economic efficiencies and close the digital divide.

Helium was founded in 2013 with a proprietary Hotspot device and a mission to deliver a decentralized wireless network for the world. In 2019, Helium introduced its blockchain to incentivize usage and expansion of its wireless network.
Since then, Helium has deployed almost one million Hotspots in more than 77,000 towns and cities across 192 countries. Helium's 5G network is also experiencing rapid growth, with over 8,000 5G radios deployed in under a year.
To keep scaling, however, the Helium community decided last year that a new architecture would be required for its L1 blockchain. The community voted on a proposal to upgrade the network by migrating to the Solana blockchain, which would solve the challenges of maintaining the Helium blockchain while also setting up Helium for long-term success.

After months of preparation, the upgrade was successfully completed.

The upgrade brings numerous benefits to the Helium network. It allows for the addition of smart contract functionality, unleashing the potential for more programmatic features and tools.

Dynamic markets can be introduced to better allocate rewards based on regional demand. Transaction fees on Solana are significantly lower than those on the Helium blockchain, which means users can benefit from lower costs. Helium's layer-1 blockchain was written in Erlang, which is far less common in crypto communities than Solana's Rust-based architecture.
By migrating to Solana, Helium can benefit from a highly engaged, global developer community.
The migration to Solana also brings network efficiency improvements. Functions of the network have been moved to oracles, which means faster data processing for devices, more stability, and reliability overall.

The move also provides access to the highly liquid and diverse DeFi ecosystem on Solana, where owners of HNT, IOT, or MOBILE tokens can access more markets and provide liquidity in exchange for rewards on platforms such as Orca or Kamino.

By migrating HNT to the Solana Program Library (SPL) standard, it carries the opportunity of making HNT natively compatible with other platforms within Solana's ecosystem as well as streamlining integrations across the entire crypto industry where SPL is a commonly accepted standard for exchanges, wallets, and service providers.

The current native token, HNT, will no longer be mined by LoRaWAN Hotspots, which will instead mine IOT, which serves as both the incentive and governance token for the Helium IOT Network. HNT will remain as the exclusive token to use the network, and it will still be burned for Data Credits (DCs), which will be priced based on IOT or 5G use, respectively.

The Solana migration will also allow developers to use the Helium core technology to build new technologies. Helium will become a base layer for projects and businesses to build on top of whenever they are in need of wireless connectivity.

Example applications include physical asset tracking, air quality monitoring, water metering, wildfire detection, foot traffic monitoring, and more.

The Helium Foundation has recently reopened its grant program to facilitate and fund open source development for hardware and software benefiting decentralized wireless and applications running on the network.

The Helium governance model will pivot away from purely HNT weighted voting to a weighted model of voting that includes both HNT and IOT tokens, reflecting the shift towards the new governance token for the Helium network.

Conclusion

The migration to Solana is a major milestone for the Helium network and its community. The upgrade to a more scalable and reliable blockchain will allow for the continued growth and development of the decentralized wireless network, while the addition of smart contract capabilities and access to the broader DeFi ecosystem will enable new economic efficiencies and use cases.

With the Helium Foundation's commitment to open source development and the community's continued support, the future looks bright for decentralized wireless networks and the potential they hold to close the digital divide.