Light Protocol
A ZK compression protocol on Solana to cut storage costs
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About Light Protocol
Light Protocol is a zero-knowledge compression and privacy infrastructure team on Solana. It targets the high rent cost of conventional state storage on that chain, which makes large airdrops, games and social apps expensive when paying for huge numbers of user accounts. The design aggregates account data into Merkle trees with only fingerprints stored on-chain and state verified by zero-knowledge proofs; the team wrote some of the chain's first zero-knowledge syscalls, cutting the cost of creating a token account from about 0.002 native tokens to roughly 0.00001.
Putting state off-chain while keeping verifiability on-chain is the shared structure of such compression schemes, at the cost of reads and writes needing proof generation services. On 10 June 2026 the team was acquired by a Solana infrastructure company, with the compression scheme having created over 90 million accounts; its token SDK stopped being maintained after the acquisition as the team moved into the acquirer's on-chain privacy layer, ending the standalone product line.
On June 10, 2026, Solana infrastructure provider Helius acquired Light Protocol, with the team joining Helius to build a programmable on-chain privacy layer. Light Protocol authored Solana's first zero-knowledge syscalls (sol_poseidon, alt_bn128, etc.) and co-built ZK Compression with Helius (cutting on-chain state storage cost by up to ~5,000x); post-acquisition the team returns to its original mission of privacy infrastructure.
Light Protocol's Future strategy and roadmap: The two plan a privacy layer supporting encrypted balances, private payments and private DeFi, with built-in auditability and selective disclosure for compliance. Existing ZK Compression users are unaffected and the protocol continues to be maintained, while the Light Token SDK will be gradually sunset. The forward strategy opens this privacy infrastructure to developers within 2026, making institutional-grade confidential transactions possible on Solana.
Swen Schäferjohann — Co-founder & Managing Director; led the Solana ZK privacy layer since 2021; joined Helius after it acquired the company in 2026.
Jorrit Palfner — Co-founder & CEO; drove the launch of ZK Compression on Solana.