In July 2019 the Helium launched it’s own L1 blockchain network designed to power IoT devices with wireless connectivity . At the time Helium was limited by the options for blockchain support when compared to today. No one could have predicted the growth the Helium Network has experienced growing to almost 1M IoT hotspots over the last three years.
Helium now plans to do the same with a 5G network for smartphones, which now has 8,400 active radios. In September of 2022 Nova Labs announced Helium Mobile which will bring even more increased activity to the network.
The goal to scale Helium to support more types of networks forced them to re-evaluate maintaining the current L1 Helium blockchain. After analyzing multiple blockchains, core developers chose Solana to massively scale the network and allow the core team to focus on supporting the growth of additional networks and building innovative wireless applications.
So what are the benefits of the Helium Network running on Solana ?
Solana is known for its ability to process a block every 400 milliseconds and its record 60k transactions per second. Just these features alone make it one of the fastest performing layer-one blockchains. Solana effectively eliminates the need for a L2 scaling solution like Ethereum uses.
Solana is able to process transactions faster with the technology it uses, so costs per transaction have been consistently low. Each transaction on Solana generally costs a fraction of a cent. Solana claims to be able to double it’s scalability every two years. If Solana is able to keep scaling at that rate fees will remain as low as they are today or even decrease in the future.
Helium’s proof-of-coverage algorithm and data transfer accounting will be transferred from validators to oracles to remove reliance on internal blockchain operations and expand its ecosystem on Solana. Oracles serve a key role in compiling off-chain data and relaying it to blockchain smart contracts. The move is expected to enhance mining rewards and improve network performance.
The move to Solana will also allow the Helium Core Developers to focus on development efforts on building the LoRaWAN and 5G networks that back the HNT ecosystem instead of spending valuable time maintaining the Helium blockchain.
Helium wallets leverage the Ed25519 curve which is the encryption mechanism that generates the public/private key for a wallet. The fact that Solana uses this same encryption mechanism was a huge consideration as it created a clear and smooth migration for existing Helium wallets to transact their HNT, MOBILE, IOT, and DC tokens on the new L1. For these chains, Helium wallet users can use their same private key to easily access their Helium tokens post-migration.
Many will say that Solana experiences too much down time as the network just recently was down for 21 hours until the chain was restarted. The fact is the Helium blockchain also had it’s share of problems as well.
On downtime, the Helium Oracle architecture will be inherently tolerant of temporary L1 outages or disconnects without affecting data transfer or the earnings of Hotspot owners.
