Zelda utilizes the Solana blockchain in the place of a server for the backend of a chat messaging application. By using Zelda you will be familiarized with Web3 basics as well as both the advantages and limitations of blockchain infrastructure. Fundamental differences start with the authentication system. Authentication is baked into Web3 and to get you started you will need your Web3 passport, your first wallet.

This step is optional but will help make sense of the experience. Blockchain is new and exciting and in order to simulate test work in a proper environment Devnet exists. Devnet is analogous to main-net, the real network, with the key difference being that the funds of Devnet do not have real world value and can be printed on a whim.

Blockchain transactions have fees. A blockchain is as strong as its weakest unit and by requiring performant hardware for each node, Solana is fast and transactions take a low percentage of the network's resources. Typically it will cost a hundredth of a cent to perform an action on Solana. However, when an action requires storing data, there is extra cost associated. Storage is not infinite and you must pay a proportionate rent for the space you are using.

Sending funds will be close to free but creating new accounts to store that data will cost a few cents for “rent”. You may have your rent be returned by closing these accounts. Space is not infinite so it needs to have a cost which for now is the effort in closing the account. As hardware improves and better tools are created on the network, space will have lower cost and become more of an automatic process.

It is inconvenient to manually delete messages to reclaim your Sol. To make the process easier, the Reclaim tool was created. It works by gathering all existing accounts you have and then selecting message accounts that no longer have a corresponding chat account. If there are chats that have been deleted but not all of the messages were deleted you can delete them with the Reclaim tool to reclaim your Sol. If you have a chat account with a lot of messages and you want to reclaim your Sol then delete the chat account and use this tool to delete the messages in one go.

While new technology is cool, there are mountains to be moved going forwards. The UX for messaging on blockchain is more cumbersome than traditional messaging apps but it does not have to be. The main burden here is not actually the approval of transactions at every step, it is actually the cost of storing data on the blockchain. If the costs were not so high, intermediary wallets could handle transaction approval with similar costs to a data center and the UX would be equivalent to traditional messaging.

By compressing On-chain data, costs can be greatly reduced. By implementing a merkle tree On-chain and utilizing off-chain indexers to serve proofs, we can achieve costs at an expected fraction of 1/2400 of the current cost. 1/2400 was the cost fraction reduction for NFT’s and allows 1 million NFT’s to be created for 5 sol or roughly 150$ USD at current value.

For a messaging protocol like Zelda, the cost reduction can be even greater. To achieve O(1) indexing, zelda requires extra data to be stored in message accounts in order to map what data goes where. Approximately 26% of the data in a max length message is for indexing. In shorter messages over 90% of the data might be just for indexing. By taking this part off-chain, blockchain messaging becomes a serious option for a disruptive technology.

Blockchain technologies are at the base, permissionless. If I want to message someone on Youtube but I have Facebook, I cannot do so without creating a Youtube account and now that chat is seperated from the rest of my messages on Facebook. If I want to message someone on Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace on Solana, I can send them a message through Zelda and both exist on Solana, the user base is shared. They still need to open Zelda to see the message, but no new account had to be made because the interfacing layer is present. The user base is open, connected, and secured through the Wallet infrastructure.

The main implication of this is composability. By sharing the same authentication layer, on-chain applications are naturally integrated with one another. Integrating a traditional server API into another app requires con-joining database resolvers which is time consuming, and error prone. On-chain applications can still be tweaked client side if desired but can also be integrated to work with your user base with essentially 0 friction.

If a web3 app like the NFT marketplace Magic Eden wanted a messaging service they could include a page on their website which used The Exact Same Code as the Zelda messaging page without ANY edits and work flawlessly. Compare this process with how you might integrate a chat app on your site and have to include new interfacing in your backend and the entire landscape and programming barrier of scaling services into future applications has just been shifted permanently.