IoT Project Helium Shuts Down Its Blockchain

The Internet of Things project Helium is abandoning its blockchain to migrate to Solana. With this migration, the project aims for better stability and scalability.

Yesterday, Helium initiated the migration to Solana at 16:00UTC. According to the official announcement, the migration is estimated to complete in 24 hours.

Helium’s native blockchain has been halted after taking a snapshot. The developers will map the existing Helium tokens (HNT) and MOBILE to the Solana blockchain. Hence, tokens native to Helium blockchain will become Solana-native tokens after the migration.

The Purpose of Helium’s Migration to Solana

Helium’s official blog reads, “The migration will generally make the Helium Network faster, cheaper, and significantly more stable.” Furthermore, the IoT platform wants to utilize the developer ecosystem of Solana.

However, the community has criticized migration in the context of stability. A Twitter user questions, “Stable? How many times has Solana gone down?”

Solana has earned a bad reputation due to frequent outages. The most recent outage happened in November last year. The crypto community severely criticized the project, as the downtime became almost a monthly affair in 2022.

Even this year, Solana faced a technical issue in February that prevented users from completing transactions on the mainnet.

Exchanges’ Support for Migration

Centralized exchanges such as KuCoin, OKX, Crypto.com, Gate.io, and Bybit will continue supporting HNT post-migration.

In contrast, after a periodic review, Binance delisted the HNT token last month. The delisting announcement caused the token’s price to plummet by around 18% in 24 hours.

In September 2022, The Helium Improvement Proposal 70 (HIP-70) that discussed migrating to Solana received 81.41% of votes in favor. Out of 7,447 votes, 6,177 supported the migration, while 1,270 were against it.

Source: Helium vote

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