Sol Incinerator Alternative: A Verified NFT Burn Comparison

TL;DR

Across three decoded payloads, the same Legacy NFT produced results ranging from 0.001441416 SOL to 0.00624348 SOL net wallet increase.

*The exact Token Studio test used the developer's own wallet, which holds an official Token Studio NFT and therefore paid no Token Studio service fee. Values in parentheses show what a standard wallet would have paid and retained: a 0.8% fee of approximately 0.00005002 SOL, leaving approximately 0.00619346 SOL after the simulated network fee.

What Sol Incinerator actually submitted

The transaction called Sol Incinerator's BURNow... program with an instruction named BurnAllTokensAndCloseAccount. Simulation showed four internal calls:

1. Burn the NFT token through the SPL Token program.
2. Close the NFT's associated token account.
3. Execute one System Program transfer.
4. Execute a second System Program transfer.

The NFT's metadata and edition addresses were not included anywhere in the transaction. A Solana program cannot modify an account that the transaction did not provide. Consequently, this payload could not close either account.

The SOL it did not recover

Once the NFT token is burned and its token account is closed separately, the normal complete Metaplex burn path is no longer available in the same form. The omitted metadata and edition balances are not merely a smaller refund; they are onchain accounts left behind by the operation.

The advertised 2% behaved like 2.74%

The associated token account held 1,488,440 lamports. Sol Incinerator's recipient gained 40,782 lamports during simulation. That is 2.74% of the amount its transaction actually recovered.

There is an unusually precise explanation. The former rent-exempt balance for a 165-byte token account was 2,039,280 lamports. Two percent of that older amount is approximately 40,786 lamports, almost exactly the fee observed in this payload. The evidence is consistent with a fee derived from the old token-account rent requirement instead of the account's current balance. This report cannot establish the implementation method without Sol Incinerator's source code, but it can establish the inputs and outputs recorded by the simulation.

This distinction is increasingly important. Solana is rolling out SIMD-0437, which reduces account rent deposits in stages and targets a 90% total reduction. The current balance in this test already reflects the lower 5,080-lamports-per-byte rate. A fee based on the former fixed amount becomes a progressively larger percentage of the SOL actually recovered as rent requirements fall. See Solana Foundation's Reduced Rent overview and the SIMD-0437 specification.

Thirty-two extra bytes recovered 4.20 times more SOL

Sol Incinerator's incomplete V0 transaction was 406 bytes. Token Studio's complete V1 transaction was 438 bytes, only 32 bytes larger.

Token Studio called the official Metaplex Token Metadata program directly and supplied the token account, mint, metadata PDA, and edition PDA. The resulting burn closed all three closable accounts in one operation. Sol Incinerator instead routed the operation through its custom program, omitted two of those accounts, and added two internal System Program transfers.

This is why fee percentages alone are a poor way to compare burners. A lower percentage does not help when the transaction fails to recover most of the available SOL.

Fee transfers also consume batch capacity

The tested Sol Incinerator operation made two internal System Program transfers in addition to its burn and close calls. Every extra call consumes transaction execution capacity. Token Studio calculates one service fee for the complete batch and places one fee transfer at the end, or none for an exempt collector.

Should you rely on Sol Incinerator for Legacy NFT burns?

Based on this reproducible failure, no. A burn is irreversible. A tool that omits recoverable NFT accounts can destroy the token first and leave the user without the complete recovery that a standard Metaplex burn would have produced.

The issue does not have to affect every collection to be serious. Users cannot reasonably inspect a serialized transaction to determine whether metadata and edition accounts are missing before they sign. The burner is responsible for identifying the NFT structure, constructing the complete operation, and calculating its advertised percentage from current onchain values.

Evidence and reproduction details

The three captured unsigned payloads targeted the same wallet, mint, and associated token account. We decoded the transactions locally and simulated them through Solana mainnet RPC with signature verification disabled and a replacement blockhash. No transaction was submitted during this comparison.

Scope and fairness

This is a documented result for one Legacy NFT tested on October 27, 2026. Other NFTs tested through Sol Incinerator did include the complete account set and recovered their metadata-related balances. We do not claim that every Sol Incinerator burn has this failure. For Sol Incinerator, this payload, its account balances, and both successful simulations make the specific result independently reproducible.

The collection had no remaining items at the time of testing. That may be relevant to the failure, but the payload alone does not prove its cause.