Helium Plunges 23% After Binance Pulls, Solana Delays

The HNT token native to the crypto-wireless network Helium fell more than 23% on news on Friday that Binance plans to pull it from its exchange. World’s Largest Crypto Exchange Binance said in an announcement starting March 23, users would not be able to redeem the token.

HNT was trading as low as $1.52 at one point on Friday, according to CoinGecko. It has since fallen to $1.60, down 17% in value over the past 24 hours.

Earlier this week, Binance.US – a sister company that is run independently of Binance and caters to US customers – also said it would be removing HNT.

“Binance’s delisting from HNT is unfortunate,” the network’s governing body said via Twitter, adding that holders of the token should consider upgrading to the self-custodial Helium Wallet app or an “exchange that has confirmed support for migration”.

HNT’s delisting comes just a month ahead of Helium’s planned blockchain merger with Solana.

Yesterday an announcement revealed that Helium Network stakeholders had decided to delay the long-awaited Solana blockchain merger until April 18.

Helium is to merge with Solana – the blockchain behind SOL, the 12th-largest digital asset by market capitalization – next month to help data transfer for devices become “faster, more reliable and more scalable”. according to the association behind the network, Helium Foundation.

Helium is a decentralized wireless network that was originally designed for Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors and trackers.

The idea is that users can share connectivity with others using their smartphones with greater privacy than a traditional WiFi network and earn HNT in the process.

Blockchain has received a lot of interest and investment big names such as Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) – and at the time his native token was trading up to $22.99. It reached its all-time high of $54.88 a few months later in November 2021.

But it has run into trouble lately: scooter ride-hailing startup Lime and cloud software giant Salesforce. refused last year that they had an active partnership with Helium, despite their logos appearing on its website at the time.