Lectura rápida
Empieza por la explicación más corta y útil antes de profundizar.
A compressed token is an SPL-compatible fungible or semi-fungible token whose per-account token balances are stored as leaves in a Concurrent Merkle Tree via Light Protocol's Compressed Token Program rather than as individual Token or Token-2022 accounts, reducing the account creation cost from ~0.002 SOL per token account to a negligible fraction of a lamport per leaf. Compressed tokens implement the same mint, transfer, burn, and delegation semantics as standard SPL tokens, but every operation requires a Merkle proof of the source leaf's existence and a validity proof of the state transition; the Compressed Token Program wraps the Light System Program to handle this ZK machinery transparently. This design is particularly valuable for airdrops, gaming economies, and reward systems where millions of user token accounts would otherwise impose prohibitive rent costs on the issuer or recipient.