If you've been active on Solana Twitter, you might have seen a lot of new exciting products being launched such as blinks and ZK compression. There is already a lot of developer content available for blinks and developers are already chewing glass and building blinks. Let's look at ZK compression - What the hell is it? What's the problem that ZK compression is trying to fix? How is it achieving it? What is ZK compression? ZK compression is a new primitive built on Solana, by Helius Labs and Light Protocol, which enables developers to create applications at scale at cheaper costs via compressing on-chain data (which is stored in Solana's state), thereby reducing the cost of creating a new account on-chain by a lot. "compressing on-chain data" doesn't mean that the data is initially being compressed via some lossy or lossless compression algorithm and is then decompressed later on. It might reduce the cost but not by a factor of 160x and 5000x. Creation Cost Regular Account Compressed Account

If you’re active on Solana Twitter, you might be familiar with the DRiP S2 drop. It took ~0.5 SOL for DRiP to airdrop ~100k “compressed” NFTs. Isn’t that nuts? If DRiP had to airdrop 100k uncompressed NFTs, it would cost them ~1.2k SOL. A whooping 2,400x difference 🤯 NFT compression on Solana allows the users to mint a large number of NFTs for a fraction of the current cost. Heads up: NFT compression doesn't mean that the "data" of the NFT is compressed into smaller bytes and stored which is decompressed later on. Well, this would decrease the cost of minting a NFT but not by a "huge" difference. The idea of "compressing and decompressing" the data of NFT won't scale at such a huge level where we could achieve a 2.4k difference. Data structures Tree Tree is a type of data structure in computer science that is a collection of objects (known as “nodes”) that are linked to each other to represent a hierarchy. The top-most node is known as the "root node" and the bottom-most nodes is known as the "leaf nodes".