After months of preparation and planning it’s official. Helium has announced a planned migration date of March 27, 2023 to the Solana blockchain. The move to Solana was enabled by the Helium community passing HIP-70 last year.

This upgrade will include all wallets and hotspots and take place over a 24 hour transition period starting at 10 AM ET. During the migration POC and data transfer will continue to function through the offchain oracle.

As a hotspot owner no action is required on your part. Just leave your hotspot turned on and powered up. The Helium Wallet App will begin a “transitioning” state during the 24-hour downtime of the migration. Once the migration is complete you can open the app again and after a minute or so you should see all of your assets and hotspots.

If you own a Helium LoRaWAN hotspot you will begin receiving IOT rewards instead of HNT post migration. On the Solana blockchain rewards accumulate to the hotspot instead of to a wallet and you must claim those rewards. You can claim as often as you would like but with every claim you will be charged a small transaction fee which on Solana is a fraction of a cent.

During the migration hotspots will not be able to be added or changed. Token transfers will not be completed and applications like the Helium Explorer will go offline. 

If you are using the original Helium Hotspot app you must upgrade to the new Helium Wallet app. You can do this by installing both apps and making sure that they are up to date and then follow the in app instructions.