Crypto connectivity project Helium kicked off its migration to the Solana blockchain midday Tuesday, abandoning its own crypto infrastructure in favor of a new, more stable home.

Developers supporting the network have initiated a 24-hour process that will kick the Helium blockchain offline and recreate its key metrics on Solana. Helium’s smart contracts will be unusable during the transition, but if all goes according to plan the network will start back up again Wednesday.

The transition aims to make it faster and cheaper to operate on Helium, a project attempting to globally deploy decentralized wireless infrastructure that relies on cryptocurrency as an incentive mechanism. Until Tuesday its tokens lived for nearly four years on the Helium blockchain, a custom layer 1 that lacked the broad appeal of Solana, Ethereum and other smart contract platforms

Moving to Solana offers the project a wider audience and a more stable platform. Despite Solana’s own history of occasional outages, it is far more reliable and stable than Helium’s, according to Helium blog posts.

(by Nick Baker)