Helium developers propose migration to Solana Blockchain

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

HIP 70, a proposal made by Helium’s core developers, says the developers believe migrating to Solana will improve Helium’s speed, stability and ability to serve more users.

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

The proposal states that Helium would move all its tokens, HNT, IOT, MOBILE and DC (Data Credits), their governance and finances 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 like Solana (which is built to handle large numbers of transactions) makes sense.

“There are now a myriad of L1 options to build on. Instead of spending time and effort improving Helium’s L1, it became clear that the Helium community could benefit from the development and shared resources of the larger industry,” it says in the proposal.

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The proposal also proposes that a greater proportion of HNT reward tokens will flow to node operators, or miners, after the move to Solana, with an increase of 6.85% compared to the current model.

The developers feel that the redistribution will push more than 2 million additional HNT to miners in the first two years, or more than $11.1 million at today’s prices.

Furthermore, according to the proposal, “the Helium community will gain a thriving developer ecosystem with thousands of developers worldwide 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 12th to September 18th. The timeline for a likely migration has not yet been revealed.