Helium HIP 70 Explained In Pictures

HIP 70 is sim­ple. We (the Heli­um Com­mu­ni­ty) are mov­ing from doing every­thing our­selves to farm­ing out a few things to experts. Here’s what it looks like.

Let’s start with the cur­rent sys­tem. Every action on one blockchain that tries to do every­thing and is get­ting bogged down:

Yes, I know Val­ida­tors aren’t in that graph­ic. We’ll get to ’em in a sec. Let’s do part 1 of the move, which is split­ting off the two most impor­tant things that don’t need to be on a a blockchain: Proof of Cov­er­age (PoC) and Data Trans­fer. Keep in mind that Data Trans­fer is lit­er­al­ly the rea­son the net­work exists; it bloody well should have its own giant home.

The two actu­al most impor­tant func­tions of the net­work, PoC (Proof of Cov­er­age) and Data Trans­fer (the rea­son the net­work exists) will move to Ora­cles (a fan­cy word for a giant com­put­er that can do all the cal­cu­la­tions required quick­ly with­out hav­ing to do any­thing else, then report the results to the blockchain. Which will be Solana.)

That split looks like this:

Ok, now what about Val­ida­tors? They’re gone, no longer need­ed. With the Ora­cles doing the work of PoC and Data Trans­fer and the blockchain record­ing it, what needs to be validated?

Heli­um runs on Solana, and in the long run, you (the Hotspot own­er) get the ben­e­fit of hav­ing a few dif­fer­ent enti­ties who are expert in their fields work­ing for you. 

Now, just because we can get through it in 3 graph­ics does­n’t mean it’s an easy task. It’ll be a hel­la­cious­ly com­pli­cat­ed and dif­fi­cult thing requir­ing extra­or­di­nary exper­tise and hard work. My pre­dic­tion is that we’ll see it com­plete in March of 2023. I’ll leave that here.

In the mean­time, you the Hotspot own­er don’t real­ly have to do any­thing spe­cial if you don’t want to. You’re always wel­come to con­tribute and build. You can cer­tain­ly learn to use Chirp­stack right now if you’ve got extra time, or fig­ure out how to run an Ora­cle, or dream up cool uses of smart con­tracts now that they’ll be avail­able on Solana.

Or you can go to the beach. What­ev­er you do, in less than a year we’re very like­ly to have a much bet­ter sys­tem, a few pow­er­ful new part­ners, and some­thing the world has nev­er seen before — a ful­ly oper­a­tional Net­work gen­e­sis machine.

Rock ‘n roll!