Solana Unveils State Compression: Revolutionizing On-Chain Storage Costs
Layer-1 blockchain Solana has introduced a groundbreaking solution called state compression, aimed at significantly reducing the cost of on-chain storage. This technology has the potential to bring down the cost of minting 1 million nonfungible tokens (NFTs) on the Solana network to nearly $110, making it a game changer in the industry.
In a blog post on April 6, Solana Foundation tech lead Jon Wong announced that compressed NFTs are now live on Solana’s mainnet-beta and are powering the next wave of innovative on-chain product experiences. Wong revealed that compressed NFTs are “2,400-24,000x cheaper than uncompressed” counterparts with identical structures, making them a highly cost-effective solution.
The Benefits of State Compression
State compression relies on Merkle trees, a data structure known for its ability to compress the verifiability of a tree of data into a hash or fingerprint of the current state of the tree. This compression-friendly data structure allows developers to store a small amount of data on-chain and update it directly in the Solana ledger, resulting in a significant reduction in data storage costs while still maintaining the security and decentralization features of Solana’s base layer.
A Collaborative Effort
According to Wong, the development of state compression is a true cross-ecosystem effort, involving collaboration between Solana Labs, Metaplex, Phantom, Solflare, RPC node providers, and indexers such as Helius, Triton, and SimpleHash. Dialect, Crossmint, Helium, and Wordcel are among the Solana ecosystem projects that have already adopted state compression, utilizing it for various use cases ranging from NFT minting to business loyalty programs and user experience improvements.
The Future of On-Chain Storage
Solana’s state compression technology has the potential to revolutionize the cost of on-chain storage, making it more accessible and cost-effective for developers and businesses. With its unique approach to data compression and collaborative effort across the Solana ecosystem, state compression is poised to drive innovation and adoption of on-chain products and experiences on the Solana blockchain.
