An NFTis 36 bytes
Reading a collection account…
GL-36 stores a whole NFT collection in a single Solana account. Each token is a 36-byte slot: 32 bytes for the owner, 4 bytes for the price. Minting, trading and transfers are instructions of one program.
48× less rent
Rent is what an NFT costs to exist on Solana. A classic Token Metadata NFT spreads over four accounts and 1,720 bytes. A GL-36 token is 36 bytes inside an account that already exists.
× less rent. You keep SOL.
Classic NFT: mint (82 B), token account (165 B), metadata (679 B) and master edition (282 B), plus 128 B of overhead per account. Rates are Solana's rent-exempt minimum per byte before and after the SIMD-0437 cuts. How rent is calculated
One slot.
Thirty-six bytes
owner
32 bytes: the owner’s public key.
price
4 bytes: the ask as a u32 in units of 1,000 lamports. Zero means not listed.
account length = 224 + minted × 36
Four rules
Storage is the product
A token is the smallest record that can still be traded: who owns it and what they ask. Everything else is derived off-chain from public, hashed inputs.
The account is the API
One getAccountInfo returns the full state. Wallets and marketplaces decode a fixed layout; there is nothing to index and nothing to trust in between.
Trading is built in
Listing, buying and transferring are instructions of the same program. A purchase checks the seller and a maximum price, so a stale listing can't be filled at a new price.
Rent goes back
Rent is read from the Rent sysvar at the moment of each operation. When Solana lowers it, withdraw_excess returns the difference to the creator.