Helium Migrates to Solana with 1 Million NFT Drop

The Helium Network‘s highly anticipated migration to Solana has been successfully completed, according to an official statement on April 19. This move is expected to greatly benefit Helium by enhancing its reliability and scalability.

The migration plans were first made public last September when the Helium community voted in favor of the move, and it took several months of hard work to bring the plan to fruition.

Commenting on the migration, Noah Prince, the Head of Protocol Engineering at Helium Foundation, notes that “Helium developers took a snapshot of the existing blockchain and loaded the necessary transactions to the new blockchain.” He goes on to add that “the contracts are permissionless and on-chain.”

As part of the migration, Helium has minted almost 1 million NFTs, with each representing a physical hotspot node that runs on its network. Now these NFTs are available for redemption by hotspot owners that support Helium through their wireless bandwidth. All that is required is for users to log into their wallet that is tied to the hotspot before proceeding to redeem the respective tokens.

The Helium Network migration to @solana is complete! 🎉 🎈

This is an incredible milestone for the global Helium community and ushers in a new era for a highly scalable and resilient Helium Network along with a new world of utility on Solana.https://t.co/Ip8bVmKeLJ pic.twitter.com/SR5eMbchsS

— Helium🎈 (@helium) April 19, 2023

Solana’s State Compression Feature Makes Minting Helium NFTs Possible

As of press time, more than 332,000 NFTs have been claimed from over 991,000 NFTs on offer, according to data compiled by Flipside Crypto. To enable the minting of such a high volume of NFTs, Helium has utilized Solana’s impressive new state compression feature.

The feature enables creators to mint a vast number of NFTs in a short amount of time and at an extremely low cost, surpassing even Solana’s standard NFT minting process. To illustrate, the Solana Foundation reports that as of April 5th, it only costs $113 in $SOL to mint one million NFTs with the state compression feature, whereas the standard process would require a whopping $253,000 worth of $SOL

The Helium Foundation explains that they minted NFTs for each hotspot in order to provide a decentralized method of authenticating nodes and distributing network credentials. Moreover, these NFTs have the potential for broader ecosystem integrations, such as token-gated benefits for NFT holders.

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