Hey everyone!

Last month, we dedicated our efforts to researching large collections on TON, and we have some exciting developments to share with you.

Let's start with some context: TON's asynchronous architecture naturally leads developers to use sharded architectures for their smart contracts. This also holds true for the current NFT standard in TON, where each NFT is represented as a separate smart contract. While this approach helps distribute the load on smart contracts, it presents some challenges for developers:

1. Deployment of an NFT collection with 1 million items results in the deployment of 1 million + 1 contracts.
2. Managing multi-NFT operations becomes a significant challenge.

However, we didn't let these challenges deter us. Our team has worked hard to find an innovative solution that allows for the deployment of extremely large collections of NFTs at a very affordable cost. While doing it entirely on-chain proved impractical, we found an excellent compromise by combining on-chain and off-chain storage of data.

Here's the basic idea: we introduce a new state for NFTs, which we call "virtual NFTs." The data for these virtual NFTs, including ownership and metadata, is stored off-chain, while on-chain, we keep a Merkle tree root containing all the NFTs in the collection. When the first transfer of a virtual NFT occurs, it gets minted on-chain, and from that point forward, it becomes indistinguishable from classical NFTs.

This approach offers numerous benefits:

1. Creation of truly massive collections, even up to 1 billion items.
2. Collection deployment comes at a fixed price, independent of its size.
3. Collection deployment costs are incredibly low, akin to deploying a normal empty collection (almost free).
4. The "claiming" of virtual NFTs is very affordable, comparable to a standard transfer.
5. Full compatibility with the existing NFT standard and mechanics.
6. The implementation on marketplace platforms is relatively straightforward.

We are thrilled to announce that today we have published this new approach as the Compressed NFT Standard. Alongside this, we have released reference contract implementations and an off-chain storage server. We eagerly await your feedback and comments on our standard draft.

Thank you for your continuous support, and let's work together to shape the future of NFTs on TON!