Overview

What is Light Protocol?

Light is a protocol built on Solana that introduces ZK compression, a primitive that enables secure scaling directly on the L1.

Why build with Light?

Hyperscale state: Developers and users can opt to compress their on-chain state, reducing state costs by orders of magnitude while preserving the security, performance, and composability of the Solana L1.

A new design space for computation: In addition to classic on-chain compute, compressed state via Light natively supports custom ZK compute, enabling developers to build previously impossible computation designs on Solana.

In depth documentation for developers is provided at https://www.zkcompression.com.

State cost reduction

Core Features

ZK and Compression in a Nutshell:

Compression: Only the state roots (small fingerprints of all compressed accounts) are stored in on-chain accounts. The underlying data is stored on the cheaper Solana ledger.

ZK: The protocol uses small zero-knowledge proofs (validity proofs) to ensure the integrity of the compressed state. This is all done under the hood. You can fetch validity proofs from RPC providers that support ZK Compression.

How to use this documentation

This documentation provides a high-level introduction to Light Protocol and is a directory of resources for building with it. The in-depth developer documentation can be found at https://www.zkcompression.com.

Light Protocol is being built in the open, and Mainnet-Beta is live! Stay up-to-date on X with the teams contributing to ZK compression and its RPC implementation: Light and Helius.

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