Solana's Latest Tech Solution Aims to Dramatically Reduce On-Chain Storage Costs – Here's How it Works

cryptonews.com:

Popular layer-1 blockchain Solana has unveiled a new solution that will dramatically decrease the cost of storing data on-chain.

In a Thursday blog post, Solana Foundation tech lead Jon Wong said the "state compression" technology would bring down the cost of minting 1 million non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the network to around 4 SOL, or $110. 

In comparison, it currently costs roughly 1,200 SOL (more than $24,000) to store 1 million NFTs on the Solana blockchain. 

“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,” Wong said.

He called the state compression technology a "true cross-ecosystem effort," noting that it was built by developers at Solana Labs and Metaplex, with support from Phantom, Solflare, and the Solana Foundation. 

State compression takes advantage of Merkle trees, a hash-based data structure that is a generalization of the hash list. 

"This compression-friendly data structure allows developers to store a small bit of data on-chain and updates directly in the Solana ledger, cutting the data storage cost down dramatically while still using the security and decentralization of Solana’s base layer."

Wong added that some projects built on the Solana ecosystem are already using state compression to cut costs, including blockchain-based messaging service Dialect and Crossmint, an NFT and API tooling company.

Furthermore, projects like user-owned wireless network Helium, NFT distributor DRiP, and on-chain publisher Wordcel are also using the new solution to offer scalable services to users of the blockchain. 

Meanwhile, Solana's native token SOL is currently trading at $20, largely flat over the