Hotspot Operator Migration Guide
No action is required of Hotspot Operators to prepare or partake in the Solana Migration.
Some important notes:
- Hotspots will stop mining HNT tokens.
- Hotspots will begin mining IOT tokens.
- Hotspots will become NFTs on the Solana Blockchain, visible in the Helium Wallet App.
- IOT Rewards are earned and accumulated to the Hotspot, and must be "claimed".
- Existing HNT tokens will remain HNT tokens.
All existing Helium Hotspots from all Hotspot Manufacturers will become "LoRaWAN Hotspots".
At the time of the Solana Migration, all existing "5G Hotspots" on the Helium Network were also LoRaWAN Hotspots but may not be enabled to operate as an active LoRaWAN hotspot.
During the Solana Migration downtime, the 24-hour period in which the state of the Helium L1 blockchain migrates to the Solana blockchain, the Helium Wallet App will present a "transitioning" screen and will not accept transaction requests.
Reward Distribution and Claiming
All LoRaWAN Hotspots will be rewarded in the new IOT subnetwork token instead of HNT.
Rewards will accumulate to each Hotspot, not directly to a Wallet, and must be "claimed" before they will be in the owning Wallet.
There is no limit to how frequently nor how many times a Wallet can claim rewards from a Hotspot, keeping in mind that every claim requires a small transaction fee in SOL.
At the time of the Solana Migration, each claiming transaction will be a fraction of a cent in SOL.
Wallets With 50+ Hotspots
Wallets with a large number, 50 or more, of Hotspots may need to wait up to 48 hours after the Solana Migration completes to see all Hotspots in the Helium Wallet App.
Because claiming is an explicit action, enlisting a service to claim rewards on all of associated Hotspots can be used. Information on these claiming services will be provided as they become available.
IOT Pre-mine
As described in HIP-52 the launch of the IoT subnetwork will include a pre-mine of 5 billion IOT tokens to Validators and Hotspots on the existing IoT network.
The IOT Pre-mine will reward Hotspots contributing and earning on the Network within the 30 days preceding the Solana Migration Snapshot.
When the Helium L1 blockchain halts, a "snapshot" of the state of the Network occurs. The Snapshot is a record of the final state of the Helium L1 blockchain.
The migration-service program will use this Snapshot to map existing rewards and Network state to the Solana blockchain.
The pre-mine allocates IOT tokens in the following proportion:
- Validators: 2.5 billion tokens, distributed proportionately to the amount of HNT staked at the time of the Snapshot.
- Hotspots: 2.5 billion tokens, distributed to all active Hotspots at the time of the Snapshot.
What is an "Active" Hotspot?
The migration service will consider a Hotspot as "Active" if the Snapshot includes any of the following:
- Witnessed and was a valid witness
- Beaconed and had valid witnesses
- Transferred LoRaWAN data and been rewarded for it
A Hotspot is not "Active" if it:
- Has not beaconed with valid witnesses
- Has not been a valid witness to a beacon
- Has not passed data and been rewarded for it
Any Hotspot on the Denylist at the time of the Snapshot is not eligible for the pre-mine regardless of meeting any other criteria.
Data Only Hotspot Eligibility
A bug in the migration snapshot resulted in Data Only Hotspots not being considered nor rewarded as part of the IOT Pre-mine.
Hotspots rewarded for poc_witness or poc_challengee activity were included in the pre-mine.
The migration-service program will allocate rewards to any Data Only Hotspot which has transferred data within the 30 days preceding the Snapshot.
5G Hotspot Eligibility
At the time of the Solana Migration, all asserted 5G Hotspots are also valid LoRaWAN Hotspots and will be allocated pre-mine rewards under the same conditions as LoRaWAN Hotspots.
Unasserted 5G Hotspots will not be eligible for the pre-mine as the Active criteria all require the Hotspot to have an asserted location recorded on the Helium L1 blockchain.
Validator Eligibility
The 2.5 billion IOT Token Pre-mine to Validators will be distributed to all Active Validators proportionately to the amount of HNT staked at the time of the Snapshot.
The migration service will consider a Validator as "Active" if the Snapshot includes any heartbeat data from the Validator.