State compression drastically cuts cost of minting NFTs on Solana

The Solana Foundation has announced that it now costs way less to mint 1 million NFTs on Solana, thanks to a new technology that helps to drastically cut costs by introducing a novel way to store NFTs on-chain.

Jon Wong, the technical lead of Solana Foundation’s ecosystem engineering team, said on Thursday that the technology in question is state compression.

Minting NFTs on Solana gets cheaper

It cost about 12 SOL (roughly $253.68) to mint 1,000 NFTs on Solana as of 5 April. To mint 1 million NFTs on the blockchain, one needed 12,000 SOL ($253,680). But with state compression, the cost of minting 1,000 NFTs drops to 2.57 SOL ($54.53) while a snapshot taken on the same day suggested it would cost roughly 5 SOL ($113) to mint 1 million NFTs. 

A snapshot comparing costs based on the prices of Ether and MATIC on 5 April showed minting 1 million NFTs on Ethereum would cost over $33 million, while the cost on Polygon would be more than $32,830. According to Wong, the estimates assumed an average gas price of 44 Gwei for Ethereum and 77 Gwei for Polygon (data pulled from block explorers on 5 April).

What’s state compression?

State compression uses Merkle trees technology to help cut the costs of on-chain data storage, with a structure that allows direct updates on the ledger. It is this feature that helps slice data storage costs even as developers continue to tap Solana’s blockchain security.

Wong explains the reduced costs in compression state as being a result of every other new compressed NFT being “solely a modification of an existing tree.” That means NFT minting costs on Solana are set to be as low as what a single transaction costs – 0.000005 SOL.

While the ecosystem can use state compression technology to store any data on-chain, the new tech’s first use case has been in compressed NFTs. These types of NFTs are like your regular NFTs, with the main difference being how cheap they are to mint.

Solana ecosystem projects currently deploying state compression include NFT and API tooling platform Crossmint and blockchain-based messaging service Dialect.