I've been diving into the web3 scene lately, starting with the Ethereum ecosystem. But since I'm a Rust developer first and foremost, Solana was an obvious choice to look into. I like it so far, Anchor makes it easy to fun to develop dApps quickly. However, I have some concerns about the economic viability of, say, social dApps.
Now, Solana has really fast and cheap transactions, which is great. My question is about rent (exemption). Let's say you want to store likes for posts (post content could be stored off-chain eg. on IPFS or Arweave). Seeing that rent exemption for an empty PDA is 0.00089088 SOL, and each additional 32 bytes (which is, if I'm not mistaken, the size of an account address), so a single "like", would cost 0.00022272 SOL, it's about $0.05 per like as things stand. Obviously Solana is an L1 network, and way cheaper and more efficient than Ethereum L1. However, how would Solana fare against and Ethereum L2, like Polygon? I have been making some calculation, and if not mistaken, using Polygon to store an equivalent amount of data would cost like $0.0005.
Things I thought of:
- Eventually reclaim the rent. If n days have passed, some logic could close the PDA and move the "like count" off-chain. No additional likes could be added after that.
- Somehow store likes off-chain. I cannot really see a truly decentralized way of making this work, only like a backend updating the respective data off-chain.
And that's just "likes". Comments would be even more expensive.
How would you approach this problem? Thanks.
