Helium [HNT] begins much-awaited migration to Solana, but…

• Despite the hype associated with Helium, SOL plunged 9.21% at press time.
• The migration comes at a time when Solana was increasingly being hit by network outages.

Helium [HNT], a decentralized wireless network, commenced its much-awaited migration to the Solana [SOL] mainnet on 18 March, with the entire process set to be complete in 24 hours.

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According to a blog post by the Helium Foundation, the Helium blockchain will stop operating during the migration period and all existing Helium assets and governance will be moved to Solana.

Despite the big development, the HNT token marked a 24-hour loss of 1.68% at press time, per data from CoinMarketCap.

Today’s the day! The Helium Network is officially migrating to @solana. The technical migration will begin at 9 am PT / 4pm UTC as part of a 24-hour transition period.

Here’s what you can expect https://t.co/lSNRTnCney pic.twitter.com/pLIg9ZR9r8

— Helium (@helium) April 18, 2023

Helium connects with Solana

The migration follows a September community vote that saw 81% of Helium community members voting in favor of the transition.

The team wanted to reduce reliance on internal blockchain operations and put their entire focus on scaling the network. With the switch, Helium will have access to Solana’s development environment, wallet compatibility, applications, and above all fast speeds.

Helium added that after migration, the hotspots will mine IOT tokens instead of HNT, and IOT tokens can be redeemed for HNT in the Wallet App. Each hotspot will have a corresponding NFT on Solana, adding over 1 million new NFTs to the chain.

The Helium mainnet, which debuted in July 2019, enables low-powered wireless devices to communicate with one another and send data through its network of nodes.

The migration comes at a time when Solana was being increasingly hit by network outages. Solana suffered its first major network outage of 2023 in February, which lasted for nearly 20 hours.

State of Solana chain

On-chain metrics underscored positive developments for Solana. The number of daily active users interacting with the chain soared 30% over the past month, data from Token Terminal revealed.

The growth in the number of users boosted the network’s transaction fees, which recorded a weekly growth of 16%. The arrival of Helium could provide more impetus to these numbers.

Source: Token Terminal

Realistic or not, here’s SOL’s market cap in BTC terms

SOL crashes, OI dips

Despite the hype associated with the Helium migration, SOL plunged 9.21% in the last 24 hours until press time, data from CoinMarketCap showed.

As per data from Coinglass, SOL’s Open Interest (OI) plunged nearly 23% in the last 24 hours, coinciding with the sharp drop in price.

However, it saw significant interest in the derivatives market over the last week during which the OI increased by more than 40%.

Source: Coinglass