The Helium blockchain is undergoing a significant change with the implementation of Nova's HIP-70 proposal, as outlined in their official blog post. The proposal aims to scale the network by moving the Proof of Coverage (PoC) mechanism off-chain and replacing the Helium L1 with Solana. This change has been voted in favor of by the community and the core developers are working to meet the 2023Q1 deadline for implementation.
Nova plans to implement the changes in two steps. The first step will be to move the PoC process off-chain, which will result in hotspots beaconing more frequently and more deterministically. The validators will no longer trigger the beaconing or issue rewards, and instead, hotspots will report the PoC events to an Oracle, which will then issue the rewards. This architecture will also allow for more robust gaming prevention mechanisms. The PoC data will still reside on the Helium blockchain.
The second step will be to replace the Helium blockchain with Solana as the L1 for Helium. While the Helium blockchain currently holds almost all of the data, Solana will mainly hold accounts, hotspots, and balances. In short, PoC data will not be on the Solana blockchain.
As a community application, HeliumGeek is affected by this change. We maintain our own infrastructure to provide a high level of service, and currently, our core PoC and reward data is fetched from the Helium blockchain through our own ETL. When Nova kills the Helium blockchain, our Helium ETL will become obsolete, leaving us without access to recent data.
While the details of the integration for community apps like HeliumGeek have not yet been clarified, we are actively following Nova's development and working on adapting our infrastructure for the HIP-70 changes. Our goal is to provide a seamless transition to Solana for all of our users and to continue providing a great user experience.
We will keep you updated on our progress as more information becomes available. Rest assured that HeliumGeek will be here for you after the Solana transition as well!