As DePIN continues to gain momentum on Solana, one challenge consistently slows teams down: managing off-chain data in a way that’s verifiable, tamper-proof, and cheap to anchor on-chain.
Reward systems, proof-of-contribution, and slashing logic all depend on data submitted by decentralized nodes, but storing that data in a secure and scalable way often forces teams to build complex backend infrastructure from scratch.
At Nitro Labs, we’ve been building Termina, a modular infrastructure stack that helps applications scale within Solana, without fragmenting liquidity. The stack includes the SVM Engine for dedicated execution, the zkSVM Prover for proof-based verification, and now, the Data Anchor: a module focused on verifiable on-chain data storage.
While DePIN is a strong early use case, early-stage teams like Ping and Botanika are already anchoring node-submitted data like bandwidth and uptime - the Data Anchor is fully data-agnostic. Any project that needs scalable off-chain data storage with verifiable on-chain commitments can use it, whether it’s for finance, governance, gaming, or beyond.
The Data Anchor has already been in use by select teams for several weeks, and we’re excited to officially launch it today at Solana Accelerate.
The Data Anchor is a lightweight, open-source toolset that lets DePIN node operators:
Instead of pushing all data on-chain to the accounts space--which is bottlenecked by throughput and cost--teams submit data blobs to the ledger and commit their content on-chain via a program derived account.
To benchmark the module's performance, we tested upload speeds and cost across multiple Solana RPC types. The goal was to validate how much data teams can push per second, and whether priority fees or congestion impact cost.
Note: Pricing is flat because uploads are charged per byte, not per compute unit. Performance varies slightly by RPC, but cost remains the same across all setups.
The system is fully open-source and ready to use - developers can adopt just the components they need: the CLI, SDK, or on-chain programs. The indexer service is an add-on that plays a critical role for teams who need long-term access to data beyond Solana’s 2–3 day ledger window, offering fast queries, historical retrieval, and inclusion proofs. Teams don’t need to deploy or manage any infrastructure themselves - they can simply forward their data to Solana.
Ping Network is a decentralized bandwidth infrastructure that gathers global bandwidth resources from data centers to individual contributors. They launched Ping Edge Node at the beginning of the month and hit 100,000+ installs within 48 hours, highlighting strong demand for network access. Ping’s engineering team has already integrated the Data Anchor module to back their contributor rewards pipeline.
“The Termina Data Anchor delivered the transparency we needed for our system—at just a fraction of the cost of full on-chain storage. Thanks to cryptographic-compression technology and robust indexing infrastructure, we achieved this without compromising on verifiability at all.’”
- Ilya, Founding Engineer @ Ping Network
By using the Data Anchor, Ping ensures their contributors’ activity can be tracked, audited, and rewarded based on data that’s both cost-effective to store and cryptographically anchored to Solana.
The result: no centralized and cryptic rewards distribution, faster iteration cycles, and less infrastructure overhead.
As more DePIN teams launch on Solana, solving the data layer is key to long-term success. We’re building tools to help them do that without getting bogged down in infra complexity.
If you're building a DePIN system or anything that collects data off-chain and needs to prove it on-chain, you can start anchoring your files with the Data Anchor today. Setup takes under 5 minutes.
Want to chat about your use case or get help integrating? We’re here. Let’s build the future of on-chain storage together.
