The technology, called state compression, promises to significantly reduce the cost of on-chain storage.
Layer-1 blockchain Solana has released a new solution designed to significantly reduce the cost of on-chain storage. The technology, called state compression, promises to lower the cost of minting 1 million non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the network to nearly $110.
Jon Wong, head of technology at the Solana Foundation, said in a blog post on April 6: “After multiple stages of development, adoption and rollout, compressed NFTs are now live on Solana’s mainnet beta and ready for the next wave of Powered by novel on-chain product experiences.” According to Wong, compressed NFTs with the same structure are “2,400-24,000 times cheaper” than their uncompressed counterparts.
1/ Solana’s low fees make it an industry leader. But thanks to a recent innovation from teams across the ecosystem, it will cost even less.
On Twitter, users categorized the state compression solution as a "game changer" and a way to "make Solana a more viable option for enterprise use cases."
According to Solana's technical lead, state compression relies on Merkle trees, "a data structure known for its ability to 'compress' the verifiability of a data tree into a 'hash' or 'fingerprint' of the tree's current state."
“This compression-friendly data structure allows developers to store small amounts of data on-chain and update it directly in the Solana ledger, significantly reducing data storage costs while still using the security and decentralization of Solana’s base layer,” Wong pointed out.
Wong said the development is "a true cross-ecosystem effort." The solution is built by developers at Solana Labs and Metaplex with support from Phantom and Solflare, and is powered by RPC node providers and indexers Helius, Triton and SimpleHash.
Dialect, Crossmint, Helium, and Wordcel are Solana ecosystem projects that already use state compression. The solutions they employ range from NFT minting to integration of corporate loyalty programs to user experience improvements.
