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

Creation Cost	Regular Account	Compressed Account
100-byte PDA Account	~ 0.0016 SOL	~ 0.00001 SOL (160x cheaper)
100 Token Accounts	~ 0.2 SOL	~ 0.00004 SOL (5000x cheaper)

Core Features

Minimal state cost	Securely stores state on cheaper ledger space instead of the more expensive account space, allowing apps to scale to millions of users.
L1 security & performance	Execution and data availability on Solana, preserving the performance and security guarantees of the L1.
Composable	Solana programs can mix and match between compressed and regular on-chain state, allowing atomic interaction with multiple programs, accounts, and compressed accounts.
Custom ZK compute	Leverage Light's on-chain contracts and plumbing, and tap into global, unified ZK-friendly state.

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.