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Compressed NFTs: The New Revolution
By Ruchi Sharma
Many creators and builders across blockchains dream of producing vast, NFT collections for various purposes. However, high storage and minting costs often crush these ambitions.
In order to reduce the cost of storing and utilizing NFTs on the Solana blockchain, compressed NFTs were developed. With the increased usage of NFTs, developers faced difficulties in optimizing storage and lowering minting costs for these digital assets. To address these issues, the Solana blockchain implemented compressed NFTs or cNFTs.
A relatively recent class of non-fungible tokens, CNFTs use state compression technologies to improve the efficiency of data storage on Solana. Merkle trees are used by cNFTs to improve data storage, in contrast to standard NFTs, which store all of the token’s metadata either directly on-chain or through external links (like IPFS).
Put more simply, cNFTs group ownership and metadata records for each token on-chain in a highly compressed format, whereas standard NFTs keep these records individually. This speeds up transactions and drastically lowers storage expenses.
Key features of compressed NFTs
At a fraction of the price of conventional NFTs, artists, and developers can mint hundreds or even millions of tokens with cNFTs, which encourages creativity. Let’s look at some key features and benefits of cNFTs:
Cost efficiency: The cost of minting thousands of compressed NFTs is significantly lower than that of ordinary NFTs.
Scalability: created for high-volume use cases that may require hundreds or millions of tokens, including social networking, gaming, and metaverse assets.
Onchain and off-chain flexibility: A large portion of the metadata can be stored off-chain, significantly cutting costs without compromising usefulness, even though ownership is tracked on-chain.
A number of significant advantages that are unique to the blockchain ecosystem are provided by compressed NFTs. Their affordability allows innovators and organizations to adopt blockchain technology without financial constraints by drastically reducing minting and storage costs.
Additionally, by lowering storage needs and, hence, energy consumption, cNFTs support more environmentally friendly blockchain operations. Because of these qualities, cNFTs have the potential to revolutionize scalable, environmentally responsible, and creative applications.
Compressed NFTs vs regular NFTs
Although tokenizing digital assets is the goal of both cNFTs and traditional NFTs, there are substantial differences in their design and use cases.
Although traditional NFTs are renowned for being exclusive and one-of-a-kind, large-scale applications may find their minting and storage expenses to be unaffordable. By using state compression to address this issue, compressed NFTs significantly lower prices and make it possible to produce tokens in large quantities at a reasonable price.
By offloading metadata to off-chain platforms, cNFTs preserve usefulness while reducing the amount of storage required by the blockchain, in contrast to standard NFTs, which frequently keep all data on chain.
For high-value, unique digital art or collectibles, regular NFTs work best. Conversely, compressed NFTs perform exceptionally well in situations requiring tremendous scalability, such as delivering digital treasures or gaming assets to millions of users.
How to mint cNFTs: A step-by-step guide
CNFTs compactly store data by using Merkle trees and state compression.
Although minting cNFTs can initially seem difficult, it’s a simple operation to carry out and distribute if you have the appropriate equipment and information. Here is a broad guide to get started on cNFTs, while specific procedures will vary depending on the platform:
Step 1: Create a wallet: To handle your money and engage with blockchain technologies, use a wallet that is compatible with Solana, such as Phantom or Solflare.
Step 2: Put money into your wallet. To offset the expense of minting, include SOL, the native cryptocurrency of Solana. Because CNFTs are so economical, even tiny quantities are adequate.
Step 3: Choose a minting platform: Select one based on the features and scale of your project.
Step 4: Get the metadata ready Describe the artwork, qualities, descriptions, and other metadata that make up your NFT collection. If necessary, make use of offchain storage options like IPFS.
Step 5: Create a Merkle tree and mint your cNFTs: Merkle trees are used by CNFTs to arrange data. This process is automated by the majority of minting platforms. To mint your compressed NFTs, adhere to the platform’s user interface. Once you validate transactions using your wallet, your cNFTs will be active.
Where are compressed NFTs stored?
In contrast to regular NFTs, cNFTs store the Merkle leaves off-chain and the Merkle root on-chain.
To ensure scalability and cost effectiveness, CNFTs use a hybrid storage strategy that strikes a balance between on-chain and off-chain storage. Because cNFT ownership is always tracked on-chain, the asset’s origins and authenticity are guaranteed.
However, a large portion of the asset’s metadata—such as pictures or comprehensive details—is usually kept off-chain. Protocols like IPFS are frequently used in this decentralized off-chain storage to guarantee that the data is dispersed and accessible by everybody.
Since it can be costly and inefficient to store huge volumes of data directly on the blockchain, this combination of off-chain information and on-chain ownership helps to drastically lower costs.
The metadata of Solana’s cNFTs is compressed and stored in a manner that preserves the integrity of the asset’s data while significantly lowering the blockchain’s storage requirements.
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