Solana, a layer-1 blockchain, has revealed a new way for cost cutting of on-chain storage. It’s believed that the technology is known as state compression, which aims to reduce costs associated with minting one million non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the network to around $110, as stated by Cointelegraph.
“After numerous phases of development, adoption, and rollout, compressed NFTs are live on Solana’s mainnet-beta and powering the next wave of novel on-chain product experiences,” Jon Wong, tech lead, Solana foundation, stated through an April 6, 2023, blog post.
According to Cointelegraph, Twitter users called the state compression feature as a “game changer,” in order “to make Solana a much more viable option for enterprise use cases.” Wong stated that stated compression depends on Merkle trees, ”a data structure known for its capability 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 bit of data on-chain and updates directly in the Solana ledger, cutting the data storage cost down dramatically while still using the security and decentralisation of Solana’s base layer,” Wong added.
Moreover, Cointelegraph noted that the facility has been termed as a “true cross-ecosystem effort.” Sources suggest that the solution was developed by Solana Labs and Metaplex, with backing from Phantom, Solflare, RPC node providers, along with indexers Helius, Triton and SimpleHash. Reportedly, Dialect, Crossmint, Helium, Wordce, among others, are Solana ecosystem projects which utilise state compression.
(With insights from Cointelegraph)