Helium Migrates to Solana Without a Hitch

TL;DR

Back in September last year, there was a vote to move from Helium’s own Layer-1 blockchain, to Solana which was approved by the community with 81.4% voting in favor of the move.
In order to migrate from one blockchain to another, an NFT to represent each physical hotspot node running on the Helium network was minted, which totaled over 991,000 Solana NFTs.
In order to mint the NFTs, Helium used Solana’s brand new ‘State Compression‘ feature, being the first most prominent large scale project to do so.
In comparison, it would be $32k on Polygon; $253k on the Solana technology that is commonly used today; and…$33.6M on Ethereum.

Full Story

Where’re our fellow nerds at?? There is some crazy stuff going on with Helium.

We’ll start with some straightforward news and dial up the madness as this story goes on…

Marketed as ‘The People’s Network,’ Helium incentivizes users to share their wireless network with others, rewarding them with Helium’s HNT token in return.

Back in September last year, there was a vote to move from Helium’s own Layer-1 blockchain, to Solana which was approved by the community with 81.4% voting in favor of the move.

(Cool – so what?)

In order to migrate from one blockchain to another, an NFT to represent each physical hotspot node running on the Helium network was minted, which totaled over 991,000 Solana NFTs.

(Okay – but how do you mint almost 1M NFTs without it costing an arm and a leg?)

In order to mint the NFTs, Helium used Solana’s brand new ‘State Compression‘ feature, being the first most prominent large scale project to do so.

According to Solana, thanks to this fancy new technology, creating these 1M NFTs cost just $113.10 in gas fees (i.e. transaction fees).

In comparison, it would be $32k on Polygon; $253k on the Solana technology that is commonly used today; and…$33.6M on Ethereum.

Feel free to nerd out in your own time here, but suffice to say the savings are made through an innovation in the way data is stored on the Solana blockchain.

Okay, so what are the takeaways?

Migrating from one L-1 blockchain to another is a huge undertaking; and from all reports so far, it’s gone down without a hitch. This is great to see! Optionality breeds competition, and competition breeds growth.
We’re starting to see some interesting projects combining blockchain technology with hardware (i.e. Wireless nodes that reward users with HNT; the Solana Smartphone etc.). Could the combination of hardware designed specifically to be powered by blockchain technology be the next growth area for Web3?

We’ll have to see how this all shakes out in the coming weeks and months.

For now, we love the innovation.