The new solution presented by Solana promises to cut the cost of minting 1 million NFTs?on the network to nearly $110

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Solana blockchain has released a new solution, called state compression, potentially able to drastically reduce the cost of on-chain storage.

Thus, compressed NFTs, that have already gone live on Solana’s mainnet-beta, “are 2,400-24,000x cheaper than uncompressed” analogues with identical structures, claims Solana Foundation tech lead Jon Wong. By rough calculations, the new technology may bring down the cost of minting 1 million NFTs?on the network to about $110.

The impressive cost cuts are “powering the next wave of novel on-chain product experiences,” says Wong. Some crypto community members suggest the innovation will make Solana more attractive for enterprise use cases.

As for the technical details, state compression technology relies on 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.”

Such data structure allows developers to store a small bit of data on-chain, while updating directly in the Solana ledger. Along with dramatic data storage cost cuts, the storage option will still be enjoying the security and decentralization benefits of Solana’s base layer.

The solution was developed by Solana Labs and Metaplex, with support from Phantom and Solflare. It is powered by RPC node providers, as well as indexers Helius, Triton and SimpleHash.

State compression is already used by Dialect, Crossmint, Helium and Wordcel. They employ other ecosystem solutions as well, such as NFT minting, integrations for business loyalty programs, and improvements in user experience.

This February, Solana Spaces experimental brick-and-mortar stores, where visitors could participate in various activities such as in-person wallet onboarding tutorials, earning rewards, shopping for Solana-themed merchandise and attending Web3 events, were closed with the firm planning to redirect its investments to “a more efficient way to bring people into Solana”.