Helium vs Steem

Helium's original Layer-1 blockchain was retired in an April 2023 migration to Solana, and the network's chain data now ships only as bulk Postgres/CSV snapshots over torrent or a requestor-pays S3 bucket rather than a queryable API. The one remaining live HTTP endpoint is the free Entity API, which returns a Hotspot's owner, asserted (H3-obfuscated) location, and on-chain asset IDs by wallet public key. It carries no uptime guarantee and is meant for light lookups, not production traffic.

Steem's public JSON-RPC API lets any client read blocks, accounts, and the blogging/social content the chain stores, using the same condenser_api methods the steemit.com frontend calls. The endpoint is HTTPS-only now — the old plain-HTTP address no longer connects — and needs no signup or key for read access. Every route tested returned CORS headers open to browser-based callers.