Helium upgraded his network from Helium blockchain to Solana
Helium announced the successful transition from the Helium blockchain to Solana. This upgrade marks a new era of increased scalability, expansion opportunities, and enhanced reliability for the world’s largest decentralized wireless network. This brings numerous advantages, such as faster transaction processing and the introduction of new capabilities for smart contracts.
What is Solana
It’s a high-performance blockchain platform designed for decentralized applications and cryptocurrencies. Solana is known for its focus on scalability, speed, and low transaction costs, aiming to address some of the limitations and challenges associated with existing blockchain networks like Ethereum.
Solana’s Advantages
Key features and aspects of Solana include ability to process a large number of transactions per second (TPS), potentially scaling to thousands or even tens of thousands of TPS, low transaction costs, fast confirmation times, which can be important for real-time applications and financial transactions, huge and fast growing ecosystem, and last but not least – support of smart contracts, allowing developers to build decentralized applications that execute programmable logic on the blockchain.
SOL is the native cryptocurrency of the Solana network. It is used for various purposes, including transaction fees, staking, and governance. Solana uses a variant of DPoS as its consensus mechanism, where a set of validators is responsible for validating transactions and creating new blocks.
Benefits for the Helium Network
The upgrade will introduce several technical enhancements to Helium, offering advantages to network users and the community:
Smart Contract Platform: The addition of smart contract functionality to the Helium Network unlocks significant potential for more programmable features and tools.
New Feature Opportunities: With expanded capabilities on Solana, the Helium Network can implement dynamic markets to allocate rewards more effectively based on regional demand.
Reduced Costs: Say goodbye to $0.35 transaction fees on the Helium Blockchain. On Solana, the average transaction fee is just $0.00025.
Access to DeFi: Solana boasts a highly liquid and diverse DeFi ecosystem.
Developer Community: Solana has a highly engaged global developer community than Helium, with monthly Hacker Houses hosted worldwide.
Network Efficiency: Network functions have been moved to oracles, providing faster data processing for devices and reducing the dependence on chain uptime for data throughput, resulting in greater stability and reliability overall.
Solana Program Library: By migrating HNT to the Solana Program Library (SPL) standard, it creates the opportunity for HNT to be natively compatible with other platforms within Solana’s ecosystem. This streamlines integrations across the entire crypto industry, where SPL is commonly accepted as a standard for exchanges, wallets, and service providers, adding more utility for HNT, MOBILE, and IOT token holders.
Changes to Vote and Governance: The voting model will shift from purely HNT-weighted voting to a weighted voting model benefiting long-term aligned partners through a vote-escrow system. This enables independent governance for the IoT and 5G networks.
Open Source Development: With the Solana migration Helium will become a true open source initiative and a foundational layer for projects and businesses seeking wireless connectivity solutions.
The biggest decentralized mobile network
Solana further enhances the Helium network’s capabilities. Launched in 2019, it has been on a mission to provide a decentralized, open-source, accessible, and secure wireless network to the global community.
Helium has now evolved into the largest LoRaWAN network worldwide, with nearly one million Hotspots deployed since its launch. It offers coverage in more than 77,000 towns and cities spanning 192 countries. Some notable metropolitan areas with comprehensive coverage include Los Angeles, New York City, Washington DC, London, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich, Istanbul, Sydney, and many others.
Presently, over 100,000 devices rely on the Helium Network for connectivity. These devices serve various purposes, including tracking physical assets, monitoring air quality, measuring water usage, detecting wildfires, tracking pedestrian traffic, and the number of applications is increasing on a daily basis.