The new technology is already being used by a number of projects to provide scalable services to blockchain users, including the user-owned wireless network Helium, the NFT distributor DRiP, and the on-chain publisher Wordcel.
Meanwhile, the price of Solana’s native token, SOL, has been relatively stable around $20 for the previous day. In contrast, the currency has dropped by more than 92% from its all-time high of $259 in November 2021.Frequently-used, top-tier blockchain Solana has introduced a novel technology that significantly reduces the price of on-chain data storage.
Solana Foundation’s technical head Jon Wong said on Thursday that the network’s cost to mint 1 million NFTs will be reduced to roughly 4 SOL, or $110, thanks to the use of “state compression” technology.
To put it in perspective, the current cost to hold 1 million NFTs on the Solana blockchain is over 1,200 SOL (almost $24,000).
Compressed NFTs are now available on Solana’s mainnet-beta and will be powering the next generation of innovative on-chain product experiences, according to Wong. This comes after several iterations of development, adoption, and distribution.
A “true cross-ecosystem effort,” he said, the state compression technology was created by engineers at Solana Labs and Metaplex with backing from Phantom, Solflare, and the Solana Foundation.
Merkle trees, a hash-based data structure that generalizes the hash list, are used for state compression.
To reduce data storage costs significantly while still benefiting from Solana’s security and decentralization, developers may take use of “this compression-friendly data structure” by storing a tiny amount of data on-chain and updating directly in the Solana ledger.
Wong said that certain Solana ecosystem initiatives, such as Dialect, a blockchain-based messaging service, and Crossmint, an NFT and API tools firm, are already utilizing state compression to save money.
After the FTX Scandal, Solana Faced a Challenging Year
Although it was promoted as a “Ethereum Killer,” 2022 was not a good year for Solana, a platform built with efficiency and speed in mind.
However, Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange, which crashed spectacularly in November of last year, was a major source of troubles for the blockchain last year.
Companies associated with Bankman-Fried reportedly had SOL tokens valued almost $1.2 billion as of June. After the downfall of FTX, many investors dumped the currency, causing the token’s price to plummet.
Two major NFT projects built on Solana, DeGods and y00ts, abandoned the network at the end of last year, dealing additional damage to the blockchain.
DeGods tweeted that it was transferring to Ethereum, while y00ts hinted that it was thinking about switching to Polygon, a popular Ethereum layer-2 solution.
“There’s an argument to be made that [DeGods] has capped out on Solana,” DeGods project head and y00ts inventor Rohun Vora, known as Frank, said in a Twitter Spaces back then.
In addition, a class action lawsuit was launched against Solana Labs in a California federal court in April. The case claims that the firm and members of the ecosystem gained illicit profits while advertising SOL as an unregistered security.
