In September of 2022 Helium publicly announced that the blockchain was being moved to Solana after the voting on HIP 70 ( Helium Improvement Proposal ) was complete with an 81% vote in favor of the proposal.
The move to the Solana blockchain was originally announced to happen Q4 2022 but has now been pushed to Q1 2023.
Many in the Helium community were unhappy with the news of the move to Solana with the majority of voting power going to so few but like it or not it will happen soon.
How will my earnings be affected as a miner ?
More rewards for Hotspot owners. With the HIP 70 proposal 2 million HNT will be returned to the rewards pool annually, benefiting hotspot owners across IoT and 5G networks. The proposal also stated that there would be a 6.85% increase in the volume of HNT reward tokens that goes to miners or node operators following the migration.
More chances of mining. Proof-of-Coverage becomes more consistent. Instead of beaconing and witnessing every few hours or days it will happen consistently every hour. The improved proof of coverage provided by the Solana blockchain will be beneficial to all Helium users making the platform more attractive to users and developers. It will also create better opportunities for hotspot owners and miners allowing them to earn more rewards.
Mining earnings will improve based on the additional 2M HNT being added to the rewards pool annually and the fact that hotspots will beacon and witness in a much more reliable manner. How much will earnings improve remains to be seen.
The Helium team is still supportive of the approved proposal and the decision to move to the Solana blockchain and view this as an opportunity for all participating on the network in spite of the events surrounding FTX.
Helium network founder Amir Haleem tweeted his support late Wednesday for the decentralized wireless network’s migration to Solana, the blockchain ecosystem perhaps hardest hit by FTX’s sudden implosion.
“None of the criteria we used to evaluate the various [layer 1] blockchains has changed from when we proposed HIP70 and now,” he said, referring to the community vote that saw Helium abandon its own blockchain in favor of Solana’s in late September.
The elephant in the room that is really not being discussed that much is the fact that Helium staking will be coming to an end as announced on helium-staking.com . For a validator staking the required 10,000 HNT this will be a significant loss of income hopefully which will be compensated by the increased rewards.
It is hard for us to announce that because of HIP70 we will be forced to shutdown our Partial Staking Pool. This is because Helium will switch blockchains and they will move to Solana. With this move, Validators are no longer needed and so, we are forced to shutdown our pool. We have a plan in place to return all HNT to each participant in the staking pool.
If you are mining HNT what are your sentiments regarding Helium ?
