The Solana (SOL) blockchain network has added a groundbreaking feature that is receiving a lot of attention from the cryptocurrency community.
On June 21, Light Protocol announced a partnership with Helius Labs to launch zero-knowledge (ZK) compression on Solana.
What is Solana's ZK compression?
ZK Compression is designed to enable scalable application development . This allows developers and users to compress on-chain state, drastically reducing state costs while maintaining Solana's security, performance, and composability.
This tool uses ZK proofs to lower the cost of creating tokens and accounts on Solana. These attestations ensure data integrity and enable retrieval through RPC providers that support ZK compression. Developers can minimize on-chain storage costs by storing only the state root on-chain and storing other data in less expensive Solana ledger space.
Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz demonstrated the significant cost savings and scalability improvements that ZK compression brings.
“In summary, we have compressed on-chain state to improve scalability by 10,000x and are one step closer to building a financial computer, an unstoppable global atomic state machine synchronized at the speed of light,” he said .
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Austin Federa, Solana's head of strategy, noted that this solution solves the problem of on-chain account storage. According to him, compression will result in significant cost savings for Solana's tokens and accounts while allowing the company to build products that can attract more users on-chain.
“Solana’s compression solves one of the key problems facing institutional and mass consumer applications: on-chain account storage costs. Generalized compression delivers the same cost savings to tokens and accounts as cNFTs did to NFTs before,” Federa said .
However, some cryptocurrency community members, such as Adam Cochrane, argue that this is essentially a layer 2 (L2) network . According to Cochrane, Solana's compression tool is L2, but the developers are marketing to the contrary.
Cochran added, “At some point Solana developers will realize that what they have built is not a monolithic chain but a good L2 feature/availability based rollup, which is a really good thing if we are honest with our users.”
Likewise, Ethereum investor Ryan Berkmans said, “The new product is actually L2. L2 is a successful model.”
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Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko countered by explaining that the product works like L2 without the usual drawbacks. He also acknowledged that “it’s not perfect, there are still smart contract risks and smart contract upgrade risks, and we need dedicated indexers for off-chain content.”
“Of course, it is L2 with no need for security committee multisig, no need for users to switch chain IDs, no need for governance tokens, no need for external sequencers, and Solana validators still collect all transaction fees,” Anatoly said. said .
