Solana Unveils a New, Cost-Effective Solution for On-Chain Storage
- Solana has debuted a new, cost-effective solution for on-chain storage that will reduce the cost of minting 1 million tokens to $110 from $250,000.
- “Compressed NFTs are 2,400–24,000x cheaper than their uncompressed counterparts, while still retaining identical structures,” said the blockchain.
- Jon Wong, the technical lead on the ecosystem engineering team at the Solana Foundation, said that the solution will use Merkle trees.
- Some of the projects that have already started using state compression include Dialect, Crossmint, Helium, and Wordcel.
Solana, the most popular blockchain that is often compared to Ethereum (ETH), is trying to keep innovating after a large number of projects had to be moved away from it a few months ago because of problems with the blockchain and multiple outages in a short amount of time.Interestingly, the blockchain aims to create a new name for itself and has announced a new, cost-effective solution for on-chain storage called “state compression.”
According to the official statement from the Solana development team, the new cost-effective solution will bring down the cost to mint over 1 million non-fungible tokens, or NFTs on the blockchain to over $110 only. This seems to be a very lucrative offering for NFT creators, who are stuck with Ethereum (ETH) and its high gas fees. Comparatively, the cost of minting an NFT on the second-largest blockchain might go from as low as $0.1 to thousands of dollars.
Jon Wong, the technical lead on the ecosystem engineering team at the Solana Foundation, the non-profit organization responsible for the development of the blockchain, said that “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.”
“Compressed NFTs are 2,400-24,000x cheaper than their uncompressed counterparts, while still retaining identical structures. Now minting 100 million NFTs on Solana costs only ◎50,” Wong said.
It is also important to mention that minting over 1 million NFTs on the blockchain cost around $250,000 prior to April 6, the launch date of compression.
Wong noted in the blog post that state compression will make use of 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.”
“State compression allows developers to use Merkle trees to store a small bit of data on-chain and updates directly in the Solana ledger, cutting the data storage cost down while still using the security and decentralization of Solana’s base layer,” explained the blockchain via its official Twitter account.
The crypto community on social media platform Twitter has reacted positively to this development, adding that this is a “game changer” and opens the path “to make Solana a much more viable option for enterprise use cases.”
According to Wong, this development is a “true cross-ecosystem effort” and was created by developers at Solana Labs and Metaplex, with support from Phantom and Solflare and powered by RPC node providers, as well as indexers Helius, Triton, and SimpleHash. Some of the projects that have already started using state compression include Dialect, Crossmint, Helium, and Wordcel.
As reported earlier by BitcoinWisdom, the top NFT projects on Solana, DeGods, and Y00ts, decided to migrate to Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (MATIC), respectively. Following the announcement from the projects, the Total Value Locked (TVL) of the blockchain dropped significantly and is down more than 90% from the all-time high witnessed in 2021.
Last year, an investor in SOL, the native crypto of the blockchain, filed a lawsuit against Solana Labs, its founder Anatoly Yakovenko, the Solana Foundation, and a number of exchanges, including Binance, for the violation of federal securities laws by selling unregistered securities to retail investors.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
