At the recent Breakpoint 2023 conference, Nicolas Pennie, Co-founder and COO of Helius, shared insights into the complexities of scaling NFT compression, emphasizing the crucial role it plays in addressing the current scalability challenges faced by the Ethereum network.
Helius, a Solana infrastructure firm, focuses on providing tools and services to optimize development on the Solana blockchain. Nicolas Pennie leads the engineering efforts in compression technology at Helius, enabling the platform to offer RPCs, APIs, webhooks, and infrastructure to streamline the development and deployment of crypto applications.
The journey into NFT compression technology began for Helius in December 2022 when Nicolas came across a white paper from Metaplex introducing algorithms for compression on the Solana blockchain. This technology significantly reduces the cost of NFT minting, slashing fees to approximately $150 for a million NFTs compared to traditional methods.
Nicolas explained the mechanics of compressed NFTs, highlighting their secure storage on the ledger using Merkel trees. These trees utilize cryptographic hashes as digital fingerprints, ensuring the integrity of stored data. Transactions and proofs are employed to verify the correctness of compressed NFTs on-chain.
The need for NFT compression became evident as large-scale adoption by clients like Helium and Dialect presented challenges. Helium, migrating from its own blockchain to Solana, utilized compressed NFTs for managing hotspots. Dialect, a messaging app, adopted compressed NFTs for exchangeable and tradable stickers.
Nicolas addressed operational challenges related to reliability and redundancy in the compression indexing system as adoption grew. To mitigate these concerns, Helius implemented measures for data redundancy and introduced a system for backfilling NFTs, enabling the restoration of missing data within specific time periods.
In March 2023, both Dialect and Helium achieved successful launches despite challenges. Dialect introduced tradable stickers, while Helium migrated to Solana using compressed NFTs. Nicolas emphasized the importance of continuous adaptation to evolving usage patterns, introducing an audit table, and tools for verifying tree integrity, detecting missing updates, and restoring data to maintain a reliable compression system.
