Solana fees explained
Solana's fee model is different than Ethereum, so most people on CT will be confused at first
Solana has two types of fees:
- storage fee
- txn fee
the txn fee is what you're used to from Ethereum, but with one big difference
on Solana, the fees are local to the app/smart contract you're interacting with
what does this mean?
on Ethereum, if there is a heavily congested app (like let's say the Bored Ape land sales from a while ago) — the fees for the entire chain rise
even if you're not using that app at all, your fees are elevated to do anything on the chain, including a basic transfer
on Solana, the fees are isolated for that app
so no matter how high the fees gets for that land sale, you can still send a txn at a low fee to another app
you can see this with data easily by looking at the difference between the average and median fees on Solana
the other fee type is called rent and it's used to store data on solana
for example, imagine you have a bank account and the default currency is USD
but let's say you want to receive CAD (because you're a moron)
to receive CAD, you'll need to first open a CAD currency account, you can't just store in a USD account
on Solana, you would open up a new token account to receive CAD
BUT the important part is that this cost is fully refundable
so if you open a CAD account, then convert back to USD, you can then close your CAD account and then receive the entire fee back
some known shortcomings:
- the storage pricing is not modeled properly
- the local fee markets are buggy in implementation but work much better than before
- the fee APIs to estimate predictable txn landing are not sophisticated yet to give deterministic results
as of this post, the median fees on solana are still around $0.003 and that's at 800-2400 user TPS
when you see a random bait screenshot on twitter, it's almost certainly either referring to:
storage fee (some exchanges cover this for you because it's refundable, but Coinbase doesn't for example) — or it's for a single very competitive market like a shitcoin and does not reflect the fees of the average user