Consider the effect of helium [HNT] migration on Solanas [SOL] NFT landscape

• The imprinting of helium hotspots as NFTs served as an effective test case for Solana’s state compression capability.
• Nearly $30 million worth of NFT sales were recorded on the chain in the past week, marking a 117% jump.

Helium [HNT]abandoned its own layer-1 blockchain and switched to Solana [SOL] mainnet last week, marking one of the biggest transitions in decentralized network history.

Is your portfolio green? Check out the Solana Profit Calculator

As part of the migration process, each physical hotspot node operating on the Helium network will have a corresponding NFT on Solana. This will eventually create over 1 million new NFTs. According to blockchain analytics firm Messari, over 350,000 hotspots have already been minted on Solana.

See more

.@heliumits migration to @solana marks one of the largest decentralized network transitions in history.

Over 350,000 hotspots have migrated with limited issues reported. pic.twitter.com/Zohdf2TEfC

— Messari (@MessariCrypto) 25 April 2023

Big boost to Solana’s NFT space

According to the Solana Foundation, the rationale behind creating an NFT for each hotspot was that it would serve as the hotspot’s credentials and verify authenticity without the requirement of a centralized server. Also, hotspot-as-NFT can provide data for developers to build applications on top of Helium.

The migration of Helium hotspots served as an effective test case for Solana’s state compression capabilities, which it recently unveiled. According to Solana’s claims, large quantities of NFTs can be minted at a fraction of the cost of Solana’s standard minting process or other blockchains.

In the example given by Solana, it costs more than $250,000 to mint one million uncompressed NFTs on-chain as of April 5th. The same would cost $113 using compressed NFTs.

Meanwhile, NFT activity picked up in the past week. Nearly $30 million worth of NFT sales were logged on the chain, marking a 117% jump, data from CryptoSlam revealed. There was also a sharp increase in the number of buyers and sellers, increasing by 35.45% and 30% respectively.

Source: CryptoSlam

The user base is expanded with Helium

The arrival of Helium helped strengthen Solana’s user base. According to Token Terminal, the number of daily active users increased by 16% compared to the previous week.

However, the growth in users failed to provide a significant boost to trading volume. This caused transaction fees aggregated on the network to decrease by 6% in the last week.

Source: Token Terminal

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

At press time, SOL was up 7.88% in the past 24 hours, data from CoinMarketCap showed. Solana’s announcement of a partnership with Google Cloud to set up a Web3 startup program could have caused this increase.

See more

The Solana Foundation is pleased to support @Google with this program and onboard the next generation of web3 builders.

For eligibility requirements, check out the grant program and the offer proposals:

— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) 25 April 2023