What's new with the Solana transition?

The Solana Migration marks a significant upgrade to the network infrastructure of the Helium network established by the Helium Core Developers in HIP-70. This includes migrating the network from its own sovereign layer-1 blockchain to the Solana blockchain and moving on-chain activity to a more efficient oracle framework.

Activity Gap

HeliumGeek provides a quick view of what's happening with your hotspot through its activity gap reporting capability. With the Solana transition, HeliumGeek will make this capability even more powerful by adding new features.

While the Proof of Coverage (PoC) is on-chain, activity gaps are reported in blocks (of Helium L1). With the Solana transition, the PoC will be completely off-chain, removing any relation of PoC activities with the chain blocks. Because of this, HeliumGeek will start reporting the activity gap in minutes. With the off-chain PoC, the reporting will be Oracle-based, which may report the PoC activities with up to a 5-minute delay. HeliumGeek will report the data as soon as it's available on the Oracle.

HeliumGeek is also adding a new feature to report the unselected witnesses to see the exact coverage of your hotspot. With this feature, you'll be able to see how many actual witnesses you're getting with each beacon, how big your competition is, and how many of your witness reports are being ignored because they couldn't get into the lucky 14.

Rewards

Hotspots are rewarded for PoC activities as well as data transfer at the end of each epoch. Epoch duration will be changed to 24 hours from 30 minutes. This means rewards will be assigned once a day, not every half hour.

Apart from the rewarding interval, hotspots will not be rewarded by HNT directly but by IOT tokens. Each PoC activity will be assigned a Reward Unit, which will earn IOT tokens at the end of the epoch.

With these changes, HeliumGeek will report the rewards in IOT and will stop reporting in your preferred fiat as the IOT value in specific fiat is not publicly available yet.

As the rewards are lazily distributed, they will need to be claimed by the user to the wallet, and we'll be stopping wallet-based reward reporting as well.

In accordance with these changes, the Reward Activity screen will start reporting in Reward Units as the in-day rewards are not determined frequently.

Ready Today!

We have been working on the Solana transition for a very long time to ensure our app continues to provide service without any problems. We're thrilled to say that our infrastructure is already up and running, and our mobile apps are also being updated.

You can preview the Solana experience on the HeliumGeek iPhone app today. Just update your app and go to Settings (gear icon on the main screen) and enable the Solana experience preview.

We're excited about the Solana transition, which will generally make the Helium network faster, cheaper, and significantly more stable.