Solana Reveals Cheap NFTs with Country Compression
On April 6, Solana announced that they would be introducing a new feature called state compression. This new feature will dramatically cut the cost of creating NFTs.
According to Solana, state compression can be used to store any kind of on-chain data; however, currently, it is most often used with non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Instead of carrying out the usual transactions, the solution requires changing the existing Merkle tree on the Solana blockchain. This makes it possible to conduct NFTs at “dramatically cheaper” prices.
The costs associated with printing and storing compressed NFTs are proportional to the number of objects considered. According to one Solana estimate, the cost of printing and storing one million compressed NFTs is $113, or 5.35 SOL. Without the state compression advantage, scoring the same number of NFTs on Solana would have cost an additional 253,680 SOL, which is equivalent to 12,000 SOL.
Also, according to Solana, the production of one compressed NFT costs only 0.000005 SOL, less than a cent. This blog article about the project covers a comprehensive pricing structure. According to Solana, currently there are at least five projects that take advantage of this capability.
