Written by: TechFlow
The market lacks liquidity and different projects are seeking vitality.
New projects will disclose more luxurious financing to attract attention, while old projects are seeking to upgrade their narrative and brand to experience a second spring.
For example, a few days ago, Light Protocol, a long-standing privacy protocol on Solana, proposed a new primitive for Solana: ZK Compression.
According to its official description, the purpose of ZK Compression is to enable native ZK computing on Solana, reducing token and account management costs on Solana by several orders of magnitude.
The slogan of Scale Anything is also particularly eye-catching; Solana is known for its speed and performance, does it still need ZK to scale? What opportunities can this new concept bring to the project itself?
ZK Compression, cheaper
ZK Compression, you can simply understand it as using ZK technology to compress the state cost on Solana.
What is state cost?
On Solana, "state" refers to the data stored on the blockchain, such as account balances, storage data of smart contracts, etc. Whenever new data is added to the blockchain, or existing data is modified, this data requires storage space and consumes computing resources.
Therefore, "state cost" refers to the cost of storing and maintaining this data on the blockchain. To put it simply, it makes the storage and maintenance of on-chain data cheaper.
Wait, isn’t Solana already cheap? Why do we need to cut costs here?
From the comparison given by Light Protocol, this reduction is very meaningful. Whether it is creating a contract or an account, the cost reduction is obvious after ZK Compression, which can be 160 times and 5000 times cheaper respectively.
There is no public chain that doesn’t like to use “cheaper” costs. In the road of not being the cheapest, but only being cheaper, each L1/L2 is fighting each other, trying to make their own costs lower and speed faster; and now this trend seems to have begun to spread within Solana.
The on-chain account only stores key information, which is cheap.
However, how does Light Protocol achieve this compression? The key to the answer lies in the "State Root".
ZK Compression uses a technology called "State Tree". You can imagine the state tree as a super compressed folder that compresses all account information and data together and only stores the most important parts on the chain.
Does it look familiar? It is similar to the Merkle tree in blockchain, where each node is the hash value of its child nodes. Eventually, all data will be aggregated into a unique top-level hash value, which is the "State Root".
After understanding this design, it is easy to understand how ZK Compression works:
Compressed account hash:
The data of each account is compressed into a hash value, which is stored in the leaf node of the state tree. Each account hash contains not only the information of the account itself, but also its position in the state tree. In this way, each account hash is unique.
On-chain state root:
The top-level hash value of the state tree, the state root, will be stored on the blockchain. This state root is like a fingerprint of the entire tree. As long as this fingerprint is verified, it can be confirmed that all data in the entire tree is complete and has not been tampered with.
data storage:
In fact, detailed account data is not stored directly on the blockchain, but is stored as call data in the cheaper Solana ledger space. Only the state root and some basic metadata are stored on the blockchain, which saves storage costs and ensures data security.
To ensure the integrity of this compressed data, ZK Compression also uses Zero-Knowledge Proofs. This technology can prove the authenticity and integrity of data without revealing the specific data content. In other words, even if the data is compressed, we can still be sure that it is accurate and secure.
More importantly, developers do not need to have an in-depth understanding of zero-knowledge proof (ZK) technology to use these new features. They can just follow the documentation provided by Light Protocol to make corresponding connections.
Summary of saving traffic: Solana on-chain accounts only store key information, making storage costs cheaper.
It is somewhat similar to the design concept of L2, but in essence it is an optimization of the internal storage structure of L1.
Manufacturing demand?
Let’s look at this question again. Solana is fast enough, is it necessary to improve its scalability so much?
The answer is obvious: yes.
Solana's on-chain wallet, daily transaction volume and dAPP activity are all increasing significantly from the data. The competition for on-chain space is becoming increasingly fierce, and the requirements for performance and cost are also getting higher and higher.
Therefore, cheaper is actually a politically correct trend. Light Protocol proposes state compression based on ZK, and the timing is relatively appropriate from a macro perspective.
But for the current market, when the short-term frenzy fades and on-chain transaction activity declines, it is possible that the benefits of improving infrastructure may not be so obvious.
However, when it comes to narrative and original language, people generally look to tomorrow from today. Only with foresight can they gain attention and become popular.
For Light Protocol itself, working on ZK Compression seems to be a professional match.
Rootdata shows that the project was established in 2021 and is committed to building fast privacy payments, encrypted order books, public chain games with privacy status, etc. on Solana;
It is worth mentioning that the project also announced in 2022 that it had received a US$4.5 million seed round of financing led by Polychain; it is now working on ZK state compression, which is still within its own technical expertise.
For retail investors and Alpha hunters, since the business of such projects is more to B, waiting for the official announcement to participate in the test network interaction (if any) is a good choice.
In addition, in the crypto industry, discussing whether there is really a demand is actually a very cost-effective way of being serious; sometimes creating demand and leading the narrative is a
Speculation in the form of open conspiracy is correct.
