The state compression approach was one of the things that attracted Helium Mobile to migrate to Solana.

On January 3, Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana who once made Silly popular, retweeted a tweet on his social media, bringing a lot of attention to a protocol called "Tiny SPL". According to the tweet, Tiny SPL is a new token standard protocol on Solana, which introduces a "state compression" method that allows users to hold tokens on Solana without paying storage rent.

The token asset based on Tiny SPL is "DN (Deez Nutz)", which can be minted for free initially. After the minting is completed, some users put DN on Magic Eden for trading. The floor price of DN fell rapidly after breaking through 0.2SOL, and was 0.00089 SOL at the time of writing.

Judging from the price changes, the market may not be very interested in Tiny SPL. However, Solana co-founder Anatoly still pins the retweet about Tiny SPL on his Twitter homepage. The technological innovation "state compression" embodied by Tiny SPL was also a hot technology in the Solana ecosystem in 2023. In view of this, Tiny SPL may have new developments in the future.

Tiny SPL, a smaller version of SPL

“Rent” in Solana Accounts

Before introducing the special features of Tiny SPL, it is necessary to introduce the concept of "Rent" in the Solana account model. Rent is different from transaction fees. Users pay rent to store data on the Solana blockchain. Transaction fees are paid for processing instructions on the network.

Unlike Ethereum, Solana charges accounts on its network a fee for storing data states, i.e., rent. The rent is charged regularly according to the size of the token balance stored in the account. If the account cannot pay the rent, the system will delete the account to reduce the storage cost for data that is no longer maintained. If the assets in the account exceed the minimum balance of two years of rent, then the account is exempt from rent.

Although according to the official website, the rent is derived from the underlying hardware storage cost. Therefore, as technology advances and hardware costs decrease, rent is expected to decrease. However, the rent is paid by SOL, and as the price of SOL rises in the near future, the actual rent paid by users will also become higher. In a valuation report on Solana, asset management company VanEck mentioned that the rental storage fee on Solana is 0.00000348 SOL per byte, the wallet data size is 372 bytes, and each active wallet holder must retain 0.0026 SOL. Similarly, applications and token smart contracts must also maintain these storage costs. A program like Serum, which is about 340KB in size, needs to maintain a balance of 2.4 SOL in order to avoid paying rent.

Solana's token standard is SPL, and Tiny SPL aims to create a "smaller" version of the SPL token standard. Through state compression, users can own tokens without paying rent.

State compression methods that attract Helium Mobile to Solana

State compression is a new way to store data that Solana launched in April 2023, which significantly reduces the cost of on-chain storage. This technology relies on Merkle trees, which can compress the verifiability of data trees into a hash. The compression-friendly structure allows developers to store small amounts of data on-chain and update them directly in the Solana ledger, significantly reducing data storage costs while maintaining the security and decentralization of the Solana base layer.

The first application scenario of the state compression method is in NFT minting, which can reduce the cost of minting NFTs on Solana by 2,400-24,000 times. According to the Solana Foundation, as of April 5, 2023, the cost of minting 1 million uncompressed NFTs on Solana is more than $250,000. The cost of minting NFTs using state compression is about $110.

Last month, Helium Mobile, a popular DePIN project, minted nearly 1 million NFTs when it migrated to Solana, with a minting cost of only US$113. This has also become a typical test case for the state compression method. These NFTs can serve as Helium's network credentials and verify hotspots. They can also integrate the functions of the entire ecosystem, including token gating and access rights for hotspot owners.

Solana provides creators and brands with a way to make NFTs available to a wider audience without paying a lot of costs through state compression. Now, Tiny SPL applies state compression to token assets, and Tiny SPL tokens do not require rent compared to tokens using the regular SPL standard. In addition, Tiny SPL tokens will not be displayed in the user's wallet balance, but only visible in the NFT section.

Tiny SPL Interaction Process

In terms of interactive experience, the token management of Tiny SPL is quite special. At present, the token asset "DN (Deez Nutz)" based on this protocol has been minted, and interested readers can buy it in the secondary market. Please note that DN has no actual value. This part is only to introduce the interactive process of Tiny SPL and cannot be used as investment advice.

Go to the Tiny SPL official website https://tinys.pl/, click "Get started" to connect to the wallet. It is recommended to use a test wallet without large assets.

After connecting your wallet, the page will detect how many Neez Nutz you have and display them (if any). The Neez Nutz icon is two peanuts.

When trading token assets, you need to determine the quantity being traded. In Tiny SPL, determining the transaction quantity requires a "split" or "merge" process.

First click Neez Nutz to enter the token management interface. If you want to send 1 DN, you need to split 125 DN into 124 DN and 1 DN before transmission. Here, 312 DN has been split into 112 DN, 109 DN and 100 DN.

If you want to continue splitting, select the asset 100DN to be split and click "Split". Enter the quantity to be split in the pop-up page and click "Split" after confirmation.

Confirm the signature in the wallet pop-up page. Here you can see that the operation performed on the wallet side is "sent 100DN, received 99DN and 1DN".

After confirmation, wait until the following page is displayed, indicating that the split is successful. Click "Done" to view the tokens after the split.

To merge Neez Nutz, select the DN to be merged and click "Combine" in the pop-up window. The following steps are the same as the splitting steps.

After the split or merge is successful, it will be reflected in the Neez Nutz assets displayed in the NFT column on the wallet side. The "2" here represents 2 (different numbers) of DNs. Then, users can trade Deez Nuts in the same way as NFTs.

Retweeted by Anatoly, worth following

The founder of Tiny SPL, sol_idity, is also a full-stack engineer at the Web3 payment infrastructure Sphere. At present, Tiny SPL is more like a technical experiment. After the launch of Tiny SPL, the splitting and merging functions had problems, which have now been fixed. If Tiny SPL really has an application scenario, it may also be aimed at project parties with a huge demand for token issuance. At present, its token Deez Nutz is more like a combination of meme and NFT.

In addition to technical innovations such as "state compression", Anatoly Yakovenko's action of forwarding and pinning Tiny SPL-related tweets is also a reason why Tiny SPL deserves attention. As a co-founder of Solana, Anatoly's "making money by shouting orders" effect is obvious. The community is best known for the meme coin SILLY derived from Anatoly's tweets and his dinosaur appearance. It was the most popular meme on Solana last month, and its holders had the highest floating profit of 27,000 times.

On January 2, Anatoly replied to a tweet about Solana’s new meme coin “LFG” with a dragon emoji. Since then, the LFG token has risen by more than 50%, setting a new record high. However, it should be noted that the transaction process of Deez Nutz is more complicated than that of general meme coins, and its narrative is not as interesting as SILLY. How it will develop in the future remains to be seen.