Crypto wireless network Helium is officially ditching its own blockchain and moving to the Solana blockchain after a community vote.
The vote saw an overwhelming majority of over 80% vote in favor of moving to the Solana blockchain rather than sticking with the network’s own blockchain.
The HIP 70 Proposal
The proposal to shift Helium, the decentralized WiFi network, to the Solana blockchain, also known as HIP 70, was voted on by members of the Helium community. The proposal concluded its voting phase early on Thursday and saw an overwhelming majority vote in favor of migrating to the Solana blockchain, with the number standing at 81% of the total votes cast.
Members wishing to participate in the vote had to stake their Helium tokens (HNT) before voting. For the vote to pass, Helium needed a two-thirds majority in favor of the vote. Around 6177 community members voted in favor of the migration, staking around 12 million HNT tokens, while 1270 voted against it.
Migration Could Achieve Better Scalability And Efficiency
Helium developers had proposed moving to the Solana blockchain as it would help the protocol scale better, thanks to significantly more efficient transactions and interoperability. Migration would also see all applications, tokens, and governance associated with Helium also move to Solana.
COO of the Helium Foundation, Scott Sigel, talked about the Solana migration in a statement, stating,
“Solana has a proven track record powering some of the world’s most important decentralized initiatives, and they were an obvious choice for us to partner with. Moving to the Solana blockchain allows us to focus our efforts on scaling the network as opposed to managing the blockchain itself.”
What Changes After Migration?
Once the migration is complete, HNT, MOBILE, and IOT tokens will also be issued on Solana. They will also continue to be tokens on the Helium Network and ecosystem as well. A new version of the Helium Wallet App will also be available once the migration is completed. All of the history associated with the Helium blockchain will also be publicly available.
Users can access the new wallet application by simply updating the current application, and token holders can also utilize other wallets present in the Solana ecosystem, such as Phantom or Solflare.
Not Everyone Is Happy
While an overwhelming majority of the community voted in favor of migrating, not everyone is happy with the decision to move to Solana. Borderless Capital, a VC focused on Algorand and backed by Helium, suggested that Helium reconsider its choice of moving to Solana and instead shift to Algorand.
Founder Explains The Rationale Behind Solana Move
Helium is closing in on achieving a million active nodes after significant growth since 2021. According to Helium founder Amir Haleem, when the protocol started, they did not believe that Ethereum could handle a distributed network with its slow throughput and high gas fees. This is why, according to Haleem, the developers of Helium created their own layer-1 blockchain network.
However, Haleem stated that this brought its own issues, as everything was intertwined. As a result, if the team tried to fix one issue, it had unintended consequences on the network, leading to frequent outages.
“Everything is just like a big, monolithic block. Iterating quickly was hard. Everything you touch… it was a massive, Jenga-like tower, basically. You move one block, and the thing starts wobbling, and we’ve had downtime and outages.”
More Reliability Needed
According to Haleem, Helium needed a more reliable solution that would also be more appealing to companies and customers that could utilize Helium’s coverage for their products. According to Haleem, the move was necessary to scale and expand the Helium ecosystem. Solana fits the bill thanks to its high speed, being able to process thousands of transactions per second.
The Helium wallet private keys are also compatible with Solana, which isn’t the case with other blockchains. This, according to Haleem, would help ease the transition from the Helium blockchain to Solana.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
