Non-profit foundation Helium has announced on Twitter that it will migrate on Solana’s blockchain in the first quarter of 2023.
Also, the organization announced that each Helium Hotspot will constitute an NFT on Solana. This means that, during Helium’s MintORama, close to 1 million new NFTs will be created on Solana. Helium reported large progress made on chain data migration to Solana’s mainnet, almost completing implementation and awaiting third-party audit. The foundation upgraded the voter stake registry and SPL Governance UI (Realms) to support voting.
Helium’s team announced an NFT Compression technology meant to cut down costs of NFT minting (close to 1 million hotspots). Helium will use Merkle trees to reduce its entire ecosystem (700,000 wallets, approximately 1 million NFTs, chain data) from terabytes of data to just 32 bytes.
During the migration to Solana, Helium announced a downtime for token rewards which is to last 24 hours. However, network transfers and rewards will be retained due to Helium Oracles already running PoC and Data Transfer Accounting.
Once the migration is done, staked Validators will be able to define the period of their veHNT’s lockup. If veHNT is locked shortly after the migration, then Validators earn a 3x voting weight bonus. The lockups have a minimum of 6 months periods.