New technology cuts NFT minting costs on Solana
Solana Foundation has launched a new technology of state compression, which involves on-chain storage, reducing Solana NFT transfer costs significantly.
Transferring NFTs gets cheaper
The Solana Foundation, in conjunction with Metaplex, has developed state compression, an innovative technology that utilizes Merkle trees to make NFT storage cheaper in the Solana blockchain. According to Jon Wong, the current cost of storing 100,000 million NFTs is 1,200 SOL (roughly $24,000), but with the new technology, it will only cost 4 SOL (approximately $103).
Solana has advocated reduced gas fees, increasing transaction speed, and minimizing environmental degradation on large-scale Web3 experiences. The new advancements have contributed to the cost-effective generation of Web3 projects.
According to Jon Wong, the state compression technology came into practice after Solana Labs and Metaplex developers researched better methods of designing gasless proficiencies on the blockchain. The technology is projected to benefit airdrop facilitators and the Web3 gaming creators who presume it costly when building on-chain digital assets.
On-chain data storage
Solana is one of the blockchains that facilitate on-chain NFT storage by giving each NFT a unique identifier. According to Wong, once users purchase an on-chain NFT, they must compensate for each stored byte.
Compression reduces the huge data junks into tiny units called fingerprints through the Merkle tree data structure. Therefore, the compressed data version is stored on-chain while the remainder is stored off-chain and retrieved using remote procedure call (RPC) facilitators. Changes occurring off-chain affect the on-chain values.
State compression is open to applicants in all forms of on-chain data, but its first application is on compressed NFT. The NFTs under the compression mode are similar to regular NFTs. The only difference is in the minting costs.
The technology has been dormant in the Solana mainnet for a few months since there were no available RPC facilitators to work on the queries. According to Wong, this is the moment when the circle is full. “Everyone is invited to transfer or make NFTs in a way that has never been seen before,” said Wong.
