On June 21, a new solution was launched with the aim of reducing on-chain storage costs by 99%. The ZK Compression technology, developed by Light Protocol, has the ability to significantly lower the cost of storing 100 compressed token accounts to about 0.0004 SOL, down from the usual 0.2 SOL – a 5000x reduction. For larger operations, such as airdrops to a million users, the costs could decrease from $260,000 to just $50. Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz highlighted the substantial cost reduction and scalability gains that come with ZK compression, emphasizing that it allows for 10,000x scale improvements and brings the development of ‘The Financial Computer’ one step closer – an unstoppable, global, atomic state machine syncing at the speed of light.
Austin Federa, the Head of Strategy at Solana, also noted that the innovation addresses the high costs associated with on-chain account storage. He explained that ZK Compression provides similar cost-saving benefits for tokens and accounts as cNFTs did for NFTs, enabling the creation of products that can attract more users to the blockchain. Members of the Ethereum community have expressed criticism of the new ZK Compression. Meanwhile, ZKsync is working on asynchronously composable ZK future for Ethereum, offering a new product that functions as an L2.
In response to the criticisms and comparisons, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko defended ZK Compression, acknowledging its L2-like features while stressing its unique aspects. He pointed out that Solana validators still receive all the transaction fees.
