Helium founder explains why the wireless crypto network is moving to Solana

Helium, the crypto-powered wireless network, will officially move from its own blockchain to Solana after a community vote on a proposal. Ultimately, over 81% of the token-based votes favored the migration.

And it can happen quickly. The Helium Foundation announced a Q4 launch for the transition, and in an interview at the Helium House event in New York City on Tuesday, network co-founder and Nova Labs CEO Amir Haleem told Decrypt that he is “optimistic” about hitting that target.

According to Haleem, the Nova Labs team – representing the founders of and core contributors to the Helium decentralized network – has already been working with the off-chain oracles to enable the new Solana-powered design. He described the on-chain work going forward, including minting and redeeming tokens, as “quite a lot simpler” by comparison.

It’s another big move for the Helium network. Helium started with a decentralized wireless network for internet-of-things (IoT) devices such as sensors and trackers, which rewards users with tokens to run nodes and share their connection. Now it’s the network approaching a million active nodes after rapid growth since the start of 2021.

Helium now aims to do the same with a 5G network for smartphones, which now has 4,500 active nodes – and Nova Labs only announced Helium Mobilean upcoming phone service that uses both the Helium 5G network and T-Mobile’s nationwide 5G network.

But to scale those networks and accommodate other wireless protocols in the future, Haleem said the infrastructure would have to change.

When Helium started building the network back in 2017, he said that even then the developers didn’t believe that Ethereum– with its limited transaction throughput and sometimes high fees – could handle a distributed wireless network at scale. Other options were limited at the time, so the founders built their own layer-1 blockchain network.

But it has also created problems. Haleem said everything is “very deeply intertwined” in the current model, including Helium’s proof of coverage and data transfer elements, and that trying to fix or change one thing could have unintended consequences with other network parts.

“Everything is just like one big, monolithic block,” Haleem told me Decrypt. “It was difficult to repeat quickly. Everything you touch… it was basically a massive, Jenga-like tower. You move a block and the thing starts to wobble, and we’ve had downtime and outages.”

Helium’s LoRaWAN (IoT) network coverage is widespread now, but Haleem said it needs a more reliable backbone to be appealing to certain types of companies and customers who might use that coverage for their products. “The reliability of [network data] packages basically have to be perfect, right?” he said. “Like, 98% isn’t good enough, 99% isn’t good enough.”

In other words, at least from the perspective of Haleem and Nova Labs, the move is less about Solana and more about scaling and expanding the Helium ecosystem. Other layer-1 blockchain networks could also be viable. But there are reasons why Helium’s core developers chose Solana after months of consideration.

One is speed, as Solana can handle thousands of transactions per second at peak: “You can do things and it happens instantly,” Haleem said. He compared its performance to that of a Web2 app, which is ideal given what he claims are many Helium users who are not crypto die-hards.

Solana has also dealt with its own stability issues, including periods of downtime—which as recently as June– something some Helium fans were quick to note when the proposal was launched. However, follows recent network upgradesSolana has appeared more stable than ever. Haleem said that Solana developers are “maniacally focused on that problem” and he is confident that stability issues will not persist.

There’s also a more technical reason Helium’s core team chose Solana: current Helium wallet private keys are compatible with Solana, Haleem said, which is not the case with any other blockchain. That should ease the transition for users, allowing tokens to “magically” move over to Solana without any “affirmative action” required for current holders,” he added.

More generally, Helium’s developers wanted to embrace a more mature blockchain network to tap into the broader crypto ecosystem, and provide access to more wallets, DeFi protocols, and various decentralized apps and marketplaces. In other words, users will be able to easily take their Solana-based HNT tokens elsewhere and explore more of the crypto world.

Joining the existing Solana site means Helium’s developers can focus solely on the wireless network, rather than having to build an entire ecosystem around it.

“For me, that’s the biggest payoff,” Haleem said. “That’s really the story here.”