Lightspeed Newsletter: Zk compression may help Solana’s data storage problems

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Howdy!

Happy (merry?) Christmas in July to all who celebrate. I know I’m in the minority for celebrating here, but I’m pushing for it nonetheless, because who would turn their nose up at a second Christmas?

I hope your email reading is merry and bright. Anyways:

What’s the deal with zk compression?

As blockchains grow in size, they become increasingly expensive to manage and maintain.

Several million Solana accounts are created every day, according to Blockworks Research. Many of these accounts may not even be actively used, but developers and users of the blockchain shoulder the cost of what’s referred to as “state” — basically the most updated look at things like how much currency is in different accounts. Storing state is expensive, because thousands of distributed validators all have to have access to the most current copy of it at all times. 

Keeping track of a lot of data costs a lot of money, so Solana has turned at times to something called “compression” — or putting a unique string of letters and numbers called a hash on the blockchain’s state space, rather than posting all of the data itself. 

The most recent instance of this is zk compression, a new tool being developed by Light Protocol and Helius that compresses Solana state while still being part of the layer-1. The tool puts underlying state data in Solana’s ledger space, which is cheaper than its state space.

A successful rollout could make rent much cheaper on the blockchain — by an order of up to 5,000 times, Light claims.

Yesterday, the infrastructure went live on Solana’s devnet, which lets developers run test transactions on Solana. Light Protocol’s co-founder Swen Schaeferjohann told me he hopes to bring the technology to mainnet by the time of the Solana Breakpoint conference in September. 

Zk compression is an evolution of compressed NFTs, which were introduced to Solana in 2023 — and initially developed during Instagram’s now-defunct NFT phase. The technology reduces onchain NFT data to a hash, which makes it much cheaper to use the assets. 

Compressed NFTs enable Drip to do things like mint videos as NFTs on Solana. Its founder is equally excited about zk compression. 

“Account rent is really the last hurdle to making the cost of storing data and interacting on-chain with Solana equivalent to Web2. I’m very excited to see the core developer community continuing to iterate on cost and speed,” Vibhu Norby, the founder of Drip, said in an email.

The “zk” in zk compression stands for zero-knowledge, which essentially means the compressed state can be confirmed to be accurate without giving away the state’s contents. This could prove especially important to privacy-sensitive users.

“In a time where the FTC is investigating larger companies such as Mastercard and Chase for surveillance pricing, consumers are now looking for an alternative to keep their information safe while performing transactions,” Intuition founder Billy Luedtke said of zk compression in an email. 

Also of note, the term “zk compression” was sort-of-coined by Light and Helius upon introducing the new piece of infrastructure last month, and it created quite the little semantic battle with the Ethereum crowd, which complained that the developers had actually created layer-2s under a different name.

This won’t matter much in the long run however. It’ll be much more important to see whether the tech can work.

— Jack Kubinec

Zero In

It’s been just a few weeks since celebrity memecoin mania was at a crescendo, but the tokens appear to have already plummeted from early price runs.

This chart posted by the pseudonymous Slorg shows a bloodbath generally following these tokens hitting all-time highs. Nearly a third of the celebrities to launch have since deleted their X posts about the projects. Not even Iggy Azalea, who continues to post constantly about MOTHER, has been spared from the carnage. 

Incidentally, MarginFi just released a new platform where traders can take leveraged short positions on Solana tokens, which may be a good tool to have in the arsenal after looking at this chart.

— Jack Kubinec

The Pulse

The launch has been well-received by the community. Solana’s official Twitter account welcomed Privy to the ecosystem, while Privy developer Osker Lu shared his excitement about expanding from Ethereum to Solana. Paradigm investment partner @caitlinxyz commented, “The world is converging towards self-custodial wallet logins… excited for Solana devs to now have access to Privy’s embedded wallets.” This sentiment was echoed by @zjbrenner, who remarked, “Huge news! There’s also some alpha in this post that I had no idea about!”

@solcostcomember told followers, “Can’t wait to see the things people build powered by Privy,” and @SpeeksX of Tensor Labs acknowledged, “Privy have been awesome to work with.” The Solana Foundation’s @therealchaseeb captured high hopes of the community with the rallying cry “world domination”!

— Jeffrey Albus

One Good DM

A message from Swen Schaeferjohann, co-founder of Light Protocol:

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