I have been wanting to propose a CIP on this for awhile but haven’t had time to get more detailed analysis.
Anthony Sadler is assisting me with that.
I think it’s worth starting a discussion here to see what people think in the meantime.
I would like to reduce utxoCostPerWord from 34482 to 3000.
This would put the amount of ADA required to send an NFT or other native token at about the same amount as a transaction fee.
I believe it is enough to prevent network and ledger spamming and keep ledger size within a resonable amount.
See the main bits of the CIP below.
What do you all think?
Shawn
Simple Summary
Enable more applicatinos for native tokens and NFTs by reducing the minimum amount of ADA required per UTxO.
Abstract
The current minimum amount of ADA required per UTxO makes many applications of native tokens and NFTs infeasible or overly complicated.
Reducing the minimum amount of ADA required per UTxO would enable more innovation in native token and NFT applications while maintaining sufficient security and reasonable memory requirements for the ledger.
Motivation
…
Specification
| Name of the Parameter | New Parameter (Y/N) | Deleted Parameter (Y/N) | Proposed Value | Summary Rationale for Change |
| --------------------- | ------------------- | ----------------------- |--------------- | ---------------------------- |
| utxoCostPerWord | N | N | 3000 | See Rationale section. |
| --------------------- | ------------------- | ----------------------- |--------------- | ---------------------------- |
Rationale
The previous value was 34482.
Currently, this means that approximately 1.5 ADA must be sent with every transaction containing native tokens or NFTs. This is on top of the normal transaction fee.
Sending $10 USD worth of a native token or an NFT requires nearly $2 USD at current prices and has been over $5 USD in the last few months.
This high “fee” is a limiting factor on the types of applications that can be built on Cardano and forces some applications to build complicated vending machines or reuires multiple transactions where only one is necessary.
With the new value the amount of ADA that must be sent is reduced to about 0.13 which puts it in the same range as the minimum transaction fee.
The minimum ADA per UTxO is necessary to prevent someone “spamming” the ledger with millions of UTxOs containing worthless tokens.
The proposed amount would still be sufficient to prevent such attacks while opening up Cardano for innovative new applications using native tokens and NFTs.
This proposal could cause an over all increase in the size of the ledger but given that the cardano-node can now store the ledger on disk rather than keeping it all in memory this is less of a concern for node operators.