Spam NFTs you never asked for, a cNFTs tab in your wallet cleaner, a burn that gave back nothing: usually, all three come down to compressed NFTs. Here's what a cNFT is, why they're so cheap to send, and why burning one returns zero SOL with any tool.
What is a cNFT?
A cNFT, or compressed NFT, is a Solana NFT with no accounts of its own. Metaplex's Bubblegum program stores it as a hashed leaf in a shared Merkle tree. No account means no rent deposit, so burning a cNFT returns 0 SOL and just removes it from your wallet.
A standard Solana NFT is a bundle of accounts: a mint, a token account in your wallet that holds it, a metadata account and an edition account, each funded with its own rent deposit. A compressed NFT skips all of them.
Instead, Bubblegum hashes the NFT's data, including who owns it, and stores that hash as a leaf in a Merkle tree. The tree is one on-chain account that can hold anywhere from thousands to more than a billion leaves, and it keeps a single root hash that summarizes all of them. To show that a particular cNFT belongs to you, an app supplies a proof: the few neighboring hashes needed to recompute that root. Every transfer or burn rewrites the leaf, so the root and the proofs change with it.
So where do the name, image and traits live? Bubblegum writes the full NFT data into the transaction that mints it, and records later changes the same way. No account stores it. RPC providers index those transactions and serve the results through the Metaplex DAS (Digital Asset Standard) API, which is how your wallet, an explorer or Sol Incinerator can display a cNFT at all. Not every RPC supports DAS.
Why are cNFTs so cheap to mint?
Minting a standard NFT means creating and funding several accounts. Minting a cNFT appends one leaf to a tree that already exists. Whoever creates the tree pays for it once, and that cost is shared by every NFT minted into it.
Metaplex's documentation puts numbers on the difference. These are its published estimates, checked October 7, 2026, and they predate Solana's September 2026 rent cuts:
| NFT standard | Accounts per NFT | Metaplex's mint cost estimate |
|---|---|---|
| Token Metadata (standard NFT) | Three or more | about 0.022 SOL |
| Core asset | One | about 0.003 SOL |
| Compressed NFT (Bubblegum) | None: a leaf in a shared tree | about 0.00001 SOL in large trees |
The two September cuts make account-based mints somewhat cheaper today, but compression stays cheaper by orders of magnitude.
That scale is the point of compression: game items, tickets and app rewards can be issued by the million. It's also why spam NFT airdrops are usually compressed. Sending a compressed NFT to a hundred thousand wallets costs the sender very little, and they never have to fund a token account for each recipient.
How do cNFTs compare with other Solana NFTs?
Where an NFT is stored decides what a burn can give back, because SOL only comes back from the accounts a burn closes or empties.
| Type | How it's stored | Average a burn returned (before fees) |
|---|---|---|
| Standard NFT | Its own mint, token, metadata and edition accounts | 0.0103 SOL |
| Programmable NFT | The same accounts, plus a token record that enforces royalties | 0.0115 SOL |
| Core asset | One account per asset | 0.00151 SOL |
| Compressed NFT | A leaf in a shared Merkle tree, with no accounts of its own | 0 SOL |
The averages come from every burn of each type made through Sol Incinerator between August 2022 and October 6, 2026, published in our burn statistics. Most of them took place before the September 2026 rent cuts, so a standard, programmable or Core burn made today returns less; the preview shows the current figure before you approve.
A cNFT also leaves no trace in your wallet's accounts. No token account opens when one arrives, and none stays behind when it leaves, so there's never an empty account to close for one either.
Why does burning a cNFT return zero SOL?
Burning gets you SOL back by closing or emptying accounts and paying out the rent deposits they held. A cNFT burn has no account to close. Bubblegum replaces your leaf with an empty hash and updates the tree's root. The tree account stays open for every other leaf in it, and its deposit was paid by whoever created the tree. No deposit was ever locked in your wallet for the cNFT.
So the zero isn't a fee, a bug or a limit of any particular tool. Through October 6, 2026, Sol Incinerator burned 9,731,020 compressed NFTs, starting in June 2023, and not one of those burns returned SOL.
There's no cut to take, either. We charge no service fee on a compressed NFT burn, so you pay only Solana's network fee. Gasless Pay takes its charge from the SOL a cleanup returns, so it can't cover these burns; keep a little SOL in your wallet for them.
Should you hide or burn a spam cNFT?
A cNFT landing in your wallet doesn't give its sender any access to your wallet. The risk is what it advertises: spam NFTs often use their name or image to steer you to a site that asks you to connect and sign, which is how a wallet drainer gets what it needs. Phantom's advice for any asset you don't recognize is not to follow its links or instructions.
You have two ways to get rid of one:
- Hide it. Phantom automatically hides collectibles that look like spam, and you can hide one yourself or report it as spam. Solflare's FAQ says you can "safely burn scam NFTs using sol-incinerator.com, or hide them from view in the Solflare app." Hiding only changes what that app shows. The NFT stays in your wallet, and other apps can still show it.
- Burn it. A burn destroys the NFT on-chain for good, so it's gone from every wallet and app.
Plenty of people burn them: compressed NFTs made up 69.1% of the NFTs burned through Sol Incinerator in 2024 and 74.4% in 2025, and 35,726 wallets burned them with us in 2026 through October 6.
Not every cNFT is junk. Projects issue real tickets, rewards and collectibles as compressed NFTs, and a burn can't be undone, so keep anything you might want.
How do you burn compressed NFTs with Sol Incinerator?
- Open Sol Incinerator and connect your wallet. The scan is read-only.
- Switch to Pro Mode. The default Fun Mode only does non-destructive cleanup and can't burn.
- Open the cNFTs tab. Compressed NFTs are listed apart from your standard NFTs.
- Select up to 30 at a time. Sol Incinerator takes up to 30 compressed NFTs per batch, so burn larger piles in several rounds.
- Check the preview and approve in your wallet. Preparing a cNFT burn takes a little longer than other burns, because each one needs its current proof. A burn is final.
If a burn fails because a proof expired, the tree changed too much between fetching the proof and sending the burn, usually because many other cNFTs in the same tree moved at once. Retry one item at a time or with a smaller batch.
While you're cleaning up, look at your empty token accounts too. The compressed NFT burns return nothing, but empty accounts left behind by tokens and NFTs you've sold or sent still hold deposits, and Fun Mode closes them without burning anything. Our account recovery guide walks through it.
Sol Incinerator
Clear compressed NFT spam in Pro Mode, then get SOL back from your empty token accounts.