- Helium completed its – much-awaited – migration to Solana.
- 1 Million NFTs representing Helium hotspots will be minted at lower costs.
After more than a year of careful planning and development, Helium has completed its migration to Solana. This would begin a new phase of scalability and reliability for the decentralized wireless network. Also, the added benefits would be faster transaction speeds, new smart contract capabilities, and NFT minting tied to migration.
Helium Migrated to Solana; Facilitating Low-Cost NFT Minting
Now, the developers of the Helium Foundation will not have to maintain a layer-1 blockchain. Its contributing organizations can now direct added resources toward the development of the network. They can now work on providing use cases to their users, including the minting of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
NFTs will represent every physical hotspot node on the Helium network. So, 991,000 Solana NFTs will be minted. Interestingly, hotspot owners will be able to claim their respective NFTs when they login to the wallet tied to their hotspot. Furthermore, these owners will also be able to transfer or update the hotspot location.
Helium Foundation’s Head of Protocol Engineering, Noah Prince, told a crypto media outlet, “Helium developers took a snapshot of the existing blockchain and loaded the necessary transactions to the new blockchain.” Moreover, the smart contracts available on the platform are on-chain and permissionless.
As of April 19, 2023, more than 150,000 NFTs have been minted, according to an analytics platform Flipside Crypto. This number could have been more as the process is still ongoing, and the data is a bit delayed.
This test case is supposed to be one of the most prominent for Solana’s new state compression feature. It allows creators to mint multiple NFTs at a low cost compared to other platforms. This is cheaper than Solana’s own standard NFT minting process.
Using this compression feature reduces the minting cost of 1 Million NFTs to about $113 worth of SOL. The price was around $253,000 worth of SOL without using this technique. In comparison, multiple NFTs on the Ethereum scaling network Polygon would cost about $32,800 worth of MATIC.
The Solana Foundation claims that minting about 1 Million NFTs on the Ethereum main net could cost around $33.6 Million. This NFT compression feature allows creators and brands to provide vast amounts of NFTs to large audiences without adding any further costs.
A general question could arise regarding minting 1 Million NFTs linked to Helium hotspots. For clarification, the Helium Foundation says that the token works as a credential for the network and is used for authenticating hotspots in a decentralized fashion. These NFTs clear the way for ecosystem-wide integrations while providing access to hotpot owners with added token-gated benefits.
In September 2022, the community voted in favor of Helium’s migration to Solana starting a months-long process for bringing the “network of network.” This new initiative was used to incentivize users to share their wireless services. In return, they received crypto token awards distributed to public blockchain networks used for NFT minting collectibles and DeFi protocols.
The majority of hotspots were made by the original Helium LoRaWAN network for providing connectivity among the lightweight Internet of Things (IoT devices) mainly consisting of sensors and trackers. These hotspot operators share their business or domestic bandwidth to power the global network. At the same time, they earn tokens as a reward for their participation in the network.
Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast and believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks and step aside from traditional monetary exchange systems. She is also intrigued by blockchain technology and its functioning.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/04/20/heliums-solana-migration-is-complete-1m-nfts-to-be-minted/