A New Era for Helium Begins with Upgrade to Solana Blockchain

After over a year of planning and development, Helium has successfully migrated to Solana, ushering in a new phase of reliability and scalability for decentralized wireless networks.

By Abhay Kumar

A new era is beginning.

Helium’s core developers are thrilled to announce the completion of the upgrade from the Helium blockchain to Solana. This upgrade establishes a new era of scalability, expansion, and reliability for the world’s largest decentralized wireless network.

Migrating the Helium Network to Solana offers significantly more utility for the network, including faster transaction speeds and new smart contract capabilities. And now that core developers will no longer have to maintain a layer-1 blockchain, the Helium Foundation and other contributing organizations can direct more resources towards our shared goals of accelerating the growth of decentralized wireless networks and bringing new applications that create economic efficiencies and close the digital divide.

The Helium Network was launched in 2019 with the mission of delivering a decentralized, open-source, accessible, and secure wireless network for the entire world. The foundation of the network was its own blockchain to incentivize the usage and expansion of a community-built wireless network.

• Helium is now the largest LoRaWAN network in the world, with almost one million Hotspots deployed since launch and coverage in more than 77,000 towns and cities in 192 countries.
• The following metro areas are just some of the cities with complete coverage: Lisbon, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington DC, London, Zurich, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Berlin, and Sydney, among many others.
• The Helium 5G network is also experiencing rapid growth, and the community has deployed more than 8,000 5G radios in less than a year.
• There are currently 25+ approved Hotspot manufacturers, four major LoRaWAN roaming partners, and a partnership with a nationally recognized carrier for 5G coverage.
• Approximately 100,000 devices are actively using the Helium Network for connectivity, not including access through roaming partners.

“The Helium Network’s permissionless global wireless coverage has expanded our capabilities at NanoThings to offer real-time tracking and closed-loop temperature monitoring, bringing up-to-the-minute data to both in-transit and stationary use cases worldwide,” said David Gruber, COO at NanoThings. “As a result, we’ve been able to drive increased adoption and today have deployed hundreds of thousands of devices across multiple continents and customers from small businesses to Fortune 100.”

The vote to move to Solana

To keep scaling, however, the Helium community determined last year that a new architecture would be required for its L1 blockchain. Core developers were spending an inordinate amount of time maintaining the Helium blockchain as two foundational elements of the network — proof of coverage and reliable data transfer activity — were becoming challenging for the blockchain to handle.

The Helium community determined and successfully voted on a proposal to upgrade the network by migrating to the Solana blockchain, to solve these challenges and set up Helium for long-term success. After months of readying the transition, a core working group recommended two weeks ago that the upgrade should proceed, and we’re very pleased to report its successful completion.

“Helium has revolutionized network connectivity through decentralized physical infrastructure, demonstrating an ability to change wireless networks by attracting participation by individuals and enterprises alike,” said Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. “Solana’s scalability, speed, and pace of innovation provides the only foundation to fulfill Helium’s decentralized network ambitions, especially around 5G.” Read more from the Solana Foundation about this upgrade here.

The upgrade will implement several technical changes to Helium that will benefit network users and the community:

• Smart Contract Platform: Adding smart contract functionality to the Helium Network unleashes massive potential for more programmatic features and tools.
• New Feature Possibilities: It’s economically inefficient to price data transfer in New York City the same as in rural Indonesia, where there’s far less Hotspot concentration. Thanks to increased functionality on Solana, the Helium Network can introduce dynamic markets to allocate rewards better based on regional demand.
• Lower Costs: Forget $0.35 transaction fees on the Helium Blockchain. On Solana, the average transaction fee is $0.00025.
• Access to DeFi: Solana boasts a highly liquid and diverse DeFi ecosystem. Owners of HNT, IOT, or MOBILE tokens can access more markets and provide liquidity in exchange for rewards on platforms such as Orca or Kamino. The open-source Helium Wallet app will also feature direct access to DeFi.
• Larger, Global Developer Community: Helium’s layer-1 blockchain was written in Erlang, which is far less common in crypto communities. Solana boasts a highly engaged, global developer community, with Hacker Houses hosted monthly worldwide.
• Network Efficiency: Functions of the network have been moved to oracles. Not only does this mean faster data processing for devices, but also that users will not need to rely on chain uptime for data throughput; more stability and more reliability overall.
• SPL Compatibility: By migrating HNT to the Solana Program Library (SPL) standard, it carries the opportunity of making HNT natively compatible with other platforms within Solana’s ecosystem as well as streamlining integrations across the entire crypto industry where SPL is a commonly accepted standard for exchanges, wallets, and service providers, adding even more utility for HNT, MOBILE, and IOT token owners.
• HNT: The current native token, HNT, will no longer be mined by LoRaWAN Hotspots, which will instead mine IOT, which serves as both the incentive and governance token for the Helium IoT Network. HNT will remain the exclusive token to use the Network; HNT will still be burned for Data Credits (DCs). Both the IoT and 5G sub-networks will be priced through distinct, independent governance.
• Changes to Vote and Governance: The Helium governance model will pivot away from purely HNT-weighted voting to a weighted model of voting that benefits long-term aligned partners through a vote-escrow system. Not only does this shift power to those taking a long view of Network health, but it also delivers yield for delegating native Helium tokens. It also enables independent governance for the IoT and 5G networks.
• Open Source Development: The Solana migration will also allow developers to use the Helium core technology to build new technologies. Helium will become a base layer for projects and businesses to build on top of whenever they are in need of wireless connectivity.
  — Over 100,000 devices use the Helium Network for connectivity today.
  — Example applications include physical asset tracking, air quality monitoring, water metering, wildfire detection, foot traffic monitoring, and more.
  — The Helium Foundation has recently reopened its grant program to facilitate and fund open-source development for hardware and software benefitting decentralized wireless and applications running on the network.

The Helium Network going forward

Helium’s mission has always been to deliver a globally contiguous decentralized wireless network where no person or device is left behind; that truly wasn’t possible without this upgrade in scalability and reliability. Network users can expect faster transaction times and increased network utility. Core developers will now be solely focused on the network, with advanced blockchain technology, more resources, and an ability to tap into the composability of the massive Solana ecosystem.

Want to build on the Helium Network? Whether you have an existing use case or want to build one from scratch, the Helium Foundation is here to help you get off the ground.

Connect with the Helium Foundation, the developers supporting this project, and the global Helium community on Helium’s Community Discord.