Solana NFT minting costs get cheaper with new technology

Solana has unveiled "state compression," which aims to decrease data storage costs on-chain.

The technology could potentially impact the NFT market and Solana-based web3 projects. State compression uses Merkle trees, a data structure that enables verifiable off-chain storage on Solana, resulting in low on-chain storage costs. Merkle trees are a type of data structure that allows for efficient and secure verification of the contents of large sets of data.

State compression, which reduces on-chain data needs, was developed by Solana Labs and Metaplex, with collaboration from RPC providers and indexers Helius, Triton, and SimpleHash, as well as support from Solana-based web3 wallets Phantom and Solflare.

Solana NFTs

State compression is being used for compressing data size, resulting in NFTs being minted at a lower cost, as noted by Jon Wong, technical lead on the ecosystem engineering team at the Solana Foundation.

Wong added that by implementing state compression technology into the Solana blockchain, storage costs have been dramatically reduced without compromising the cryptographic security or decentralization offered by the network. He claimed that minting 100 million compressed NFTs would cost around 50 SOL ($1,000) with this mechanism.

"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," the core developers note.

Some projects within the Solana ecosystem, such as Dialect and Crossmint, are already utilizing state compression to build web3 experiences and create compressed NFTs.