Helium Token holders approve exchange to Solana Blockchain

Token holders in decentralized wireless provider Helium have formally voted to move from their own Layer-1 blockchain to the Solana protocol.

On Wednesday, an 81.41% community majority officially ratified the Helium Improvement Proposal (HIP 70) aimed at developing the network to meet user demand. Participants had to stake the Helium token (HNT) to participate in the vote.

The final results showed that 6,177 members voted for the migration by betting around 12 million HNT ($57 million), while 1,270 voted against it.

The Helium Foundation said the switch will allow HNT to become more compatible with other projects and crypto applications in decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens and other Web3 applications.

“Solana has a proven track record of driving some of the world’s most important decentralized initiatives, and they were an obvious choice for us to partner with,” Helium Foundation COO Scott Sigel said in a statement.

“By moving to the Solana blockchain, we can focus our efforts on scaling the network as opposed to managing the blockchain itself.”

Helium’s core development team presented the proposal, called HIP 70, on August 31. They said the move would “bring significant economies of scale through the broad range of composable Solana developer tools, features and applications.”

Helium is still working on revenue streams amid the Solana migration

Helium had attracted controversy in the weeks leading up to the proposal, with some questioning the network’s revenue potential. Prominent investors defended the startup, saying it was still building infrastructure and revenue would come later.

HNT, one of the project’s original tokens, is down 90% from all-time highs recorded when crypto prices peaked last November, correlating with the rest of the digital asset market.

In any case, as a result of Helium’s impending migration, all current ecosystem tokens including HNT, MOBILE and IOT will soon be issued on Solana.

Once the migration is complete, a new version of the Helium Wallet app will be available, the network said. The history of the previous blockchain will still be available to the public.

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