Minimum ADA per transaction

Developers
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I’ve been reading that in Cardano, by design, for any transaction there should be a minimum amount of ADA being sent, that amount being practically > 1 ADA.

This sounds good for the moment, as 1 ADA is practically $1 USD.

But what will happen when the ADA value grows? If it ever hits big values, let’s suppose $100 USD. Having to send a minimum of $100 USD (1 ADA), sounds pretty bad.

How will this adapt in the future?

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Hi @cabada,

We can send lovelaces, but in the future update. See the comment from people in the Github below:

@SebastienGllmt SebastienGllmt commented on 28 Jul 2020

You can transfer out less than 1 ADA, you just can’t create new UTXO entries that are less than 1 ADA. This is meant to make spamming the network harder. We’d like to have a better system later such as UTXO storage rent (like in Ergo) or a deposit & refund system (like we have for stake keys and pool certificates), but we just haven’t had time for Shelley and it will have to come in a future update

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Thanks for the response.

What about for scenarios like minting tokens or transferring tokens? Working with Multi-Asset Tokens

  1. Minting a token involves paying fees.

In the example of above’s link, a fee of 180109 lovelace is calculated. Again this sounds reasonable as of today for minting. But what will happen when value of ADA grows, needing to pay >$20 USD for just minting a token sounds bad.

  1. Tokens cannot be transferred by themselves and they need to be sent with a minimum amount of ADA in the transaction.

Same problem. Attaching to the transaction this minimum amount sounds reasonable today, but sounds bad if the value of ADA grows.

So, is this really a problem and something needs to be done in future forks to change this? Or am I misunderstanding the way it works?

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Hi there,

Answering your questions:

  1. Minting a token involves paying fees → it’s either the fees is adjusted (people can vote for that in Project Catalyst/Catalyst Voting) or in the future there will be changes in the policy.
  2. Tokens cannot be transferred by themselves and they need to be sent with a minimum amount of ADA in the transaction. → I don’t know about this one. But yeah, in the future, it should be possible to just send the tokens only (transaction fees are still needed though in ADA). Let’s just wait for the Alonzo Hard Fork rollout.
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