Millions Of Compressed NFTs Are Being Minted Weekly On Solana
Bubblegum From Metaplex Leverages Merkle Trees To Reduce Costs Of Minting and Interacting With NFTs
By: Owen Fernau • Loading...
NFTs & Web3![Millions Of Compressed NFTs Are Being Minted Weekly On Solana](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.sanity.io%2Fimages%2F6oftkxoa%2Fproduction%2Fac96069f8a902c162453d2eeb91939bcd43d43e7-880x495.jpg&w=828&q=75)
Bubblegum, a tool which brings down the cost of interacting with NFTs on the Solana blockchain using compression techniques (cNFTs), is routinely being used to mint over 3M NFTs on a weekly basis.
![Metaplex Weekly Mints](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.sanity.io%2Fimages%2F6oftkxoa%2Fproduction%2F1eaf5d891ebf93fd6dad7f67a482761aeecfbe9d-642x379.jpg&w=828&q=100)
Bubblegum’s key adopter is Drip Haus, a project which allows creators to mint and airdrop NFTs. Drip has been touting Bubblegum’s compression technology since early 2023.
![tweet screenshot](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.sanity.io%2Fimages%2F6oftkxoa%2Fproduction%2F411aa922c076db63614e198f3a46cc86337b95b0-526x253.jpg&w=828&q=100)
It’s notable that a cost-saving feature has generated so much use on Solana. The blockchain already has cheap fees relative to Ethereum — even in a low-demand environment, a simple token transfer on Ethereum costs $0.63 while Solana transactions generally cost fractions of a cent.
Bubblegum uses Merkle Trees, a data structure widely used across blockchains, to bring down the cost of minting the cNFTs. This is because scanning the items in a Merkle Tree scales logarithmically, meaning that minting larger numbers of NFTs results in lower costs per cNFT.
![cNFT Minting Costs](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.sanity.io%2Fimages%2F6oftkxoa%2Fproduction%2F01a2dc9afe73f905c34bf25ec55c7348085127ba-626x246.jpg&w=828&q=100)
To be sure, mints don’t equate to a hot market for NFTs on Solana — data from Solscan shows volume in SOL terms for NFTs has been relatively flat over the past 90 days.
![Solana NFT Volume](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.sanity.io%2Fimages%2F6oftkxoa%2Fproduction%2Fa4089b0778856d70b73bbe6a5618068fb2de459a-801x416.jpg&w=828&q=100)
Bubblegum was developed by Metaplex, which also features a framework for launching NFTs on Solana called Candy Machine and upgraded its protocol in January to allow creators of NFTs to enforce royalties.
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