Good morning.

Helium have now finally announced a date for the migration to the Solana network. The proposed date is March 27th 2023 and will take approximately 24 hours starting from 1500 UTC time.

There is an upgrade readiness group to help smooth the transition including Bobcat, RAK  and Seeed studios. If you have more than 50 hotspots you can also apply to be part of this group.

For the transition to go ahead the Helium blockchain will be halted and a final snapshot will be taken. No hotspots can be added to the Helium network during this time and token transfers will stop, the helium explorer will go offline. Once migrated you after the 24 hour period these functions should return to normal. Hotspot owners shouldn't need to do anything as data will be taken over by the off chain oracles and there will be an OTA (over the air update) before the migration.

When the news first came out about the move to Solana, I must admit I thought it was a good idea but I do find it difficult to be optimistic about Helium right now. Knowing that the algorithm/ protocol for identifying cheating hotspots is incorrect or not working makes me wonder what else is not working. Also with the number of hotspots online now being under 500,000 the network is getting smaller by the day. In my opinion this will not be good for Helium when trying to 'sell' their network to large companies.

As with all things though we will have to wait and see, I am sure there will be some migration issues though.

As always, thank you for reading and feel free to comment.