Solana, the blockchain touted as an “Ethereum-killer,” has been struggling this year with network outages and technical failures.
However, the Solana Foundation has announced a game-changing breakthrough that could save the ecosystem. On April 6th, Solana introduced state compression, a new technology that uses Merkle trees to store data on-chain in a cost-effective manner.
State compression technology dramatically reduces NFT minting costs, with the cost reduction ranging from 2,400 to 24,000 times lower. The new approach is expected to make minting one million uncompressed NFTs, which currently costs $250,000 or 12,000 SOL, drop to $110 or 5 SOL.
Many projects, including blockchain-based messaging service Dialect and NFT tooling platform Crossmint, are already utilizing the new technology. Other startups such as Helium, Drip, and Wordcel are integrating the technology to improve their services.
State compression technology, which employs Merkle trees, can compress extensive data sets into hashes representing the entire dataset. These hashes facilitate the verification of the data set without the need to store all of it, resulting in a significant reduction in data storage costs while maintaining speed, security, and decentralization. Storing only the hashes on-chain enables anyone on the network to reconstruct the complete dataset accurately off-chain. This breakthrough could be a significant boost to the Solana ecosystem, which has been grappling with increasing NFT minting costs. The reduction in expenses resulting from the technology could aid Solana in re-establishing its reputation and attracting more users and developers to its platform.
