Exciting news about the future of People’s Network – the Helium team just announced that Light Hotspot migration onto the mainnet will start officially in April. Right now OG Helium Hotspots are witnessing each other on Testnet in Modesto, California and they are receiving challenges from Validators.
The tests will continue until the end of March. From April 1st Light Hotspots will be migrated to the mainnet and will be activated in the next two weeks.
Great news for Helium community
The migration is of great importance for the future development of Helium network and the whole Helium community and ecosystem. It will improve the Helium network, will enable its faster progress in the future and will provide more opportunities for the owners of Helium hotspot miners.
All hotspots will stop syncing the blockchain, the blockchain information will be provided by Validators and again the Validators will create challenges for the hotspots. As pointed our by Helium, the Light Hotspot software will allow the Hotspot to earn HNT and to participate as a Full Hotspot, without the extra overhead of maintaining a local copy of the blockchain.
Are we going to get less rewards for PoC after this update?
Currently, hotspot miners are getting rewards for PoC activities as follows:
| PoC Challenger | 0.9% of the HNT rewards |
| PoC Challengees | 5.02% |
| Witnesses | 20.08% |
There are also rewards for Data transfer, but they do not matter for this calculation. So The Chalenges will be constructed by the Validators, instead of the hotspots and therefore we will lose those rewards. This means that Hotspots will lose about 3.5% of their current rewards on average. And all sceptics that do not like HIP55 are using exactly this as an argument.
But there is also another point of view. The blockchain works in a way that the rewards are not rewarded per day or month but per epoch. The target time for a block is 60 seconds and one epoch consists of 30 blocks. So one epoch should be 30 minutes. But in real life as a result of the network being slow, blocks take more time to be produced. For example at the moment of writing this article the average block time for the last 24 hours is 65.25 sec. 5.25 seconds do not seem too much, but this is around 8% slower than the target and if this gets optimised we can expect almost 8% more rewards per day and month which should compensate for the above 3.5% and even there will be more left. This is without considering that there were even longer block times in the network in the past couple of months.
And on top of that a faster network will open more opportunities for it to be actually used for traffic and data, which should bring more real life interest in Helium as a viable network, which will lead to higher HNT price in the future.
Hotspot Makers are already involved in the process
Helium already invited all makers of hotspot miners to the new Testnet, facilitating the process of pointing their products to Testnet and update their firmware. Thus they can test their current hotspots and confirm until the end of the month that they can receive challenging from Validators, send challenges, witness, and earning rewards without any problems.
After this period Light Hotspots will be migrated to мainnet and if some Makers can’t confirm their Hotspots work ok on Testnet and HIP55 is activated, they will no longer earn rewards for PoC. As pointed out by the Helium team “This is a mandatory upgrade to the network and anyone that does not upgrade, will be left behind.”
Important info for HeliumMart customers:
Right now both Browan Communications and Milesight have their devices on Testnet and their teams are working to ensure that this important migration will be seamless for the owners of their hotspot miners. As the deadline approaches we’ll keep you informed about any news related to the testing process as well as this major network change.
