The Solana project’s development team unveiled state compression technology that significantly reduces costs for on-chain operations.
1/ Solana’s low fees have made it an industry leader. But thanks to a recent innovation from teams across the ecosystem, it’s about to cost even less.
Introducing state compression, a new way to store data on Solana that lowers cost significantly. https://t.co/0baMJ0vOn1
— Solana (@solana) April 6, 2023
The proposed solution uses Merkle trees — structures that enable efficient and secure verification of large data sets.
The on-chain data-reducing technology state compression was created by Solana Labs in collaboration with Metaplex, Helius, Triton, SimpleHash, with participation from wallet developers Phantom and Solflare.
6/ State compression is a true cross-ecosystem effort — with support from @Metaplex, @heliuslabs, @Triton_one, @SimpleHashInc, @phantom, @solflare_wallet, @SolanaLabs, and @SolanaFndn.
— Solana (@solana) April 6, 2023
The new approach can, for example, be used to significantly reduce costs when issuing non-fungible tokens. According to John Wong of the Solana Foundation, creating 100 million “compressed” NFTs would require only 50 SOL (~$1,000).
“This compression-friendly data structure allows developers to store a small on-chain data set, updating it directly in the Solana network. In doing so, the cost of storing data is significantly reduced without compromising security and decentralization,” said representatives of the project.
The new solution has already been adopted by some ecosystem platforms, including Dialect and Crossmint.
Earlier in February, Solana validators restarted the network twice due to an error that caused a complete halt to economic activity on the blockchain.