• Solana has unveiled a new solution that will reduce the cost of storing data on-chain.
• State compression technology is now live on Solana’s mainnet-beta and is being used by various projects to cut costs.
• The native token SOL of Solana had a tumultuous year in 2022, marked by outages and overloads due to its significant exposure to Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange.
Solana Unveils New Solution for Data Storage
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, 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. This compares favorably with current costs of roughly 1,200 SOL (more than $24,000) per million NFTs stored on the Solana blockchain.
State Compression Built By Cross-Ecosystem Effort
Wong called state compression a “true cross-ecosystem effort” built by developers at Solana Labs and Metaplex, with support from Phantom, Solflare, and the Solana Foundation. Taking advantage of Merkle trees – hash-based data structures – this compression-friendly format allows for small bits of data to be stored directly in the Solana ledger at much lower cost than before.
Projects Already Using Technology To Cut Costs
Some projects already using state compression include blockchain messaging service Dialect; Crossmint; user owned wireless network Helium; NFT distributor DRiP; and on-chain publisher Wordcel – all offering scalable services after implementing this new solution.
Solana Token Performance in 2021/2022
The native token SOL currently trades at $20 largely flat over the past day but down more than 92% compared to its all time high registered in November 2021. Last year was tumultuous for Solana which faced outages and overloads due to its significant exposure to Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX exchange . Reportedly his companies held nearly $1.2 billion worth of SOL tokens in June leading many investors dumping their holdings as prices tumbled drastically .
Conclusion
In conclusion , with its new state compression technology , projects are already taking advantage of its capabilities to reduce storage costs significantly while still enjoying decentralization , security benefits offered by solanas base layer .