- Hitting Helium hotspots as NFTs served as an effective test case for Solana’s state compression capability.
- NFT sales worth nearly $30 million were recorded on the chain last week, up 117%.
Helium [HNT]left its own layer-1 blockchain and switched to the Solana [SOL] mainnet last week, one of the biggest transitions in the history of decentralized networks.
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As part of the migration process, each physical hotspot node operating on the Helium network will have a corresponding NFT on Solana. This will ultimately create over 1 million new NFTs. According to blockchain analytics company Messari, more than 350,000 hotspots have already been hit on Solana.
.@helium‘s migration to @solana marks one of the largest decentralized network transitions in history.
More than 350,000 hotspots have been migrated with a limited number of reported issues. pic.twitter.com/Zohdf2TEfC
— Messari (@MessariCrypto) April 25, 2023
Big boost to Solana’s NFT space
From Solana Foundation, the rationale behind hitting an NFT for each hotspot was that it would act as a reference of the hotspot and confirm its authenticity without the requirement of a centralized server. In addition, the hotspot-as-NFT could provide data for developers to build programs on top of Helium.
The migration of Helium hotspots served as an effective test case for Solana’s state compression capability, which was recently revealed. According to Solana’s claims, large amounts of NFTs can be minted at a fraction of the cost of Solana’s standard coining process or that of other blockchains.
In Solana’s example, minting one million uncompressed NFTs as of April 5 will cost more than $250,000 on the chain. The same costs $113 with compressed NFTs.
Meanwhile, NFT activity picked up over the past week. NFT sales worth nearly $30 million were recorded across the chain, up 117%, data from CryptoSlam revealed. The number of buyers and sellers also increased strongly by 35.45% and 30% respectively.
Source: CryptoSlam
User base expands with Helium
The arrival of Helium helped bolster Solana’s user base. According to Token Terminal, the number of daily active users is up 16% in the past week.
However, the growth in the number of users did not significantly boost trading volume. This led to transaction fees collected on the network falling by 6% over the past week.
Source: Token Terminal
Realistic or not, here is the market cap of SOL in BTC terms
At the time of writing, SOL is up 7.88% over the past 24 hours, data from CoinMarketCap showed. Solana’s announcement of partnering with Google Cloud to create a Web3 launcher may have sparked this uptick.
The Solana Foundation is happy to support @Google with this program and aboard the next generation of web3 builders.
See the grant program and RFPs for eligibility requirements: https://t.co/6wlbICu9k9 https://t.co/P94ifq6ctT
— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) April 25, 2023
