The first 4 bytes are the magic number and the last 4 bytes are the checksum [1] which you could always just chop off if you wanted (it's legal to omit the chec

The first 4 bytes are the magic number and the last 4 bytes are the checksum [1] which you could always just chop off if you wanted (it's legal to omit the checksum, see the spec). That would get the total overhead down to 5 bytes. [1]: https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/dev/doc/zstd_compression_format.md#zstandard-frames https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/dev/doc/zstd_compressi...