Scaling Application Infrastructure

Key Insights

• Consumer applications require lower asset issuance and transfer costs to become feasible on-chain. Three solutions addressing these problems are Solana’s state compression, Lens’ Momoka, and AltLayer’s flash layers.
• Solana state compression achieves fraction-of-a-penny minting and transfer costs by hashing NFTs into a Merkle tree stored on-chain. This technique allows for billions of NFT mints at less than 1% of the previous cost.
• Lens’ achieves 25,000 transactions per second by utilizing Momoka, a parallel execution layer that uses Arweave (via Bundlr) for data availability.
• AltLayer uses on-demand “Flash Layers” to facilitate low-cost NFT minting. Post-mint, the data on assets’ state is transferred back to the underlying base layer.
• Our comparison scored Solana’s state compression the best of the three, narrowly beating Momoka due to greater extensibility and slightly lower costs.

To get a sense of the challenge facing Web3 applications looking to usurp their web2 counterparts, we may look no further than Twitter, which saw 24.4 thousand tweets per second during France’s equalizing goal during last year's World Cup Final.