Helium Developers Proposes Migration To Solana Blockchain

Blockchain platform Helium is considering moving from its own blockchain to Solana.

HIP 70, a proposal put forward by the Helium’s core developers states that the developers think migrating to Solana would improve Helium’s speed, stability and ability to serve more users.

“Solana offers significant benefits to Helium that include, but are not limited to, scale, community, and composability,” read the proposal. “This change will be momentous in scope, impact, and benefit to the Helium network and its users.”

The proposal states that Helium would move all of its tokens, HNT, IOT, MOBILE, and DC (Data Credits), their governance and economics to Solana. 

Helium will rely on third-party data sources and not on the blockchain or oracles to manage Helium’s proof-of-coverage infrastructure and data transfer accounting functionality. 

Helium’s developers said in the proposal that when they first launched the network, there were few layer-1 blockchain platforms and it made the most sense to build their own. 

However, since then, the network has scaled and migrating to an open-source platform such as Solana (which is built to handle large numbers of transactions) makes sense.

“There is now a myriad of L1 options to build on. Rather than spend time and effort improving Helium’s L1, it became clear that the Helium community could benefit from the developments and shared resources from the larger industry,” states the proposal.

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The proposal also puts forward that a larger share of HNT reward tokens will flow to node operators, or miners, following the move to Solana, with a 6.85% increase over the current model.

The developers feel that the re-distribution will push more than 2 million additional HNT to miners over the first two years, or more than $11.1 million at the current price.

Furthermore, according to the proposal “The Helium community will gain a thriving developer ecosystem of thousands of developers worldwide who are working on applications that are only possible on Solana due to its fast and cheap transactions.”

Token-based community voting will take place from September 12 to September 18. The timeline for a probable migration has not yet been revealed.