- Solana attempts to make a comeback, with the introduction of a new promising technology dubbed “State compression.”
- The technology promises to significantly reduce the cost of minting NFTs on the Solana network.
Solana makes up a fair share of the conversations in the crypto community. However, these conversations have mostly been centered around the network’s inconsistency and recurring breakdown. On what looks like a mission to redeem itself, the network has announced a groundbreaking NFT feature poised to shake the entire NFT and Web3 market at large.
In a recent announcement curated by Jon Wong, the technical lead on the ecosystem engineering team at the Solana Foundation, Wong details the needs that Solana’s latest NFT feature promises to meet.
The “State Compression” technology as it is called, is designed to reduce the cost of minting NFTs.
The technology makes use of a data system known as Merkle trees. Merkle trees allow for verifiable off-chain storage on the Solana network. This then leads to the reduction of on-chain storage costs.A segment of the announcement read:
When it comes to building web3 experiences at scale, Solana has been the industry leader thanks to its unparalleled speed, minimal environmental impact, composability, and low gas fees. But now, it’s about to cost even less to build user-first web3 projects. Introducing state compression, a new way to store data directly on-chain that cuts down on cost by magnitudes of scale.
State Compression already being used by leading NFT firms
Apparently, State Compression is already in use. According to the announcement, teams across the Solana network have already begun utilizing state compression to power massive user-friendly experiences.
Crossmint, an NFT firm using a modular suite of APIs and tools to create, distribute, and custody NFTs at scale. The firm is utilizing state compression to build integrations. These integrations help companies across the globe to power deeper customer loyalty.
Similarly, Dialect, a smart messaging protocol that powers seamless, on-chain messaging experiences, is using state compression. The firm uses state compression to cover the cost of minting NFT stickers for its large user base.
Notably, Helium, a blockchain-based network that connects IoT devices, NFT distributor DRiP, and Wordcel, an onchain-publisher, all use state compression to push their scalable, user-first experiences to the Solana network. The State Compression technology also has other use cases, outside on-chain data storage, the first being compressed NFTs. The announcement added:
Although state compression can be used to store any sort of data on-chain, the first use of this innovative technology is compressed NFTs. Compressed NFTs are just like regular NFTs, only drastically cheaper — minting 100 million compressed NFTs costs about ◎50 to store on-chain, compared to ◎1.2mm for their uncompressed counterpart.
Additionally, due to the fact that every incremental compressed NFT is in fact a modification of a tree that already exists, the cost of an NFT on the Solana network has dropped to as low as◎0.000005, for a single transaction.
