Proposal for a temporary one-off code change to reduce the skyrocketing costs of rent

Governance
#61

Hi all. My name is Canaan, I run a company called Stardust and we’ll be supporting Solana and working with games among others on Solana to run the blockchain engine behind their game.

@matt-KF 's problem statement is 100% spot on. For context we’ve been exploring this exact problem this week and am glad someone else has brought it up, right now its 100% unfeasible to have data-accounts en-masse on Solana, whether they be for inventory storage or NFT IPFS-hashes. The rapid increase of SOL price by 100x is a serendipitous black swan event, but its completely priced out business like ours from using Solana (which we really want to do!).

Referencing @matt-KF’s stats above, they have $5.5m in locked SOL for 55 million accounts… imagine today when we want to support a game like Star Atlas with 100x million NFTs within it and millions of players how many data accounts this will take to track, not including trades ect.

When companies like ours abstract blockchain away, we seek to roll these protocol fees into SaaS economics, but thats impossible in this scenario because the storage cost on Solana cost is already 1000x above anything we could charge a customer for.

The other thing, is I need to do financial modeling for my startup based upon how many games we can support, the cost to support each game ect, otherwise known as a component of COGS (cost of goods sold). From that perspective, understanding how the storage price fluctuates and making sure it isnt too volatile is a big component for us doing cost modeling.

I agree with @matt-KF’s proposal, but I also like his suggestion of volume-based discounts. Could be logarithmically, but I think that programs on Solana should have a decreasing byte storage cost logarithmically based upon how much data they’re storing. This better-correctly models AWS and other storage providers, where at 1mb of data storage your price may be 20% above cost, but as you reach 1000gb, your price becomes only 5-7% above cost.

Something has to change here, glad that this discussion has already been started. As a temporary fix, I would suggest a static change of the value, as I am sure something on the protocol level will take time to implement.

I can be reached at @StardustCanaan on telegram, @matt-KF plz shoot me a message.

Side note:

For those who think that locking SOL for rent-exemption is fine regardless of the price because you can always get it back and therefore you’ll never lose the SOL, this is a skewed way of looking at the problem outside the lens of trying to run a self sustaining business.

  • Locked SOL is effectively gone forever for us, we can never remove that games data (or users), so whether its burned or locked, its gone from my pocket

  • Even if I could reclaim it, the NPV of cash is very important to startups. Locking $50k into a contract is a big deal for my startup, thats multiple months of runway for many and can be the difference between success and failure

  • While I’m bullish on Solana, being a large holder of SOL as a company (which we would be through all this locked SOL storage) is a concern to be too over exposed in a bear market. If we count all locked SOL on our balance sheets, its possible the value of our company could halve just do to all the SOL we hold through storage.

Sorry for all my random things I’ve typed, its late, hopefully some make sense!

6 Likes
#62

Question here.

Why would validators get more hardware / larger hardware? What incentive is there for them to do so if they’re getting the same $$$ since the storage price keeps going up as we near capacity?

I guess on the other way, what negative incentive is there for miners NOT to increase their hardware and therefore artificially drive up the storage price as it best suits them?

#63

Thanks Anatoly - what is the timeline to expect changes in this area?
@clinder has made some good points - Can we can reduce the cost of rent now as a temporary fix while more permanent/dynamic options are considered?

2 Likes
#64

Another point to bring up thats probably beneficial here, is there needs to be some thought given into storage rent arbitrage - it would be “easy” (depends upon the setup) to clear storage and reinitialize when rent exemption is cheaper. This could lead to some weird side affects.

As said above, a temporary fix is probably just change the hardcoded value while some other formula is worked out.

1 Like
#65

I already understand the regulation, i will support it as the both side have the reward they want. Love $KIN to the moon🚀

1 Like
#66

They should be pricing it at 2/4x the hardware costs. Like AWS. So getting more $ out of capex for the same opex is really really risk free return.

1 Like
#67

yea, thats generally fine. We want folks to write smart contracts that can reclaim storage. The other option is to eliminate persistent storage and to force everyone to deal with rent that eventually gets to 0 and stuffs their account into an RSA accumulator.

1 Like
#68

asap, main blocker is accounts index is still in RAM, here is the PR to track progress there:

There may be more PRs that get pulled in. but things are making progress. The roadmap would be

  1. get the index out of RAM so validators can scale the total account set on the chain with SSDs
  2. get the runtime to deal with state rent that adjusts up and down
  3. reduce rent and add a governance hook for validators to set their current capacity
3 Likes
#69

Thank you for this, I will be following along

1 Like
#70

What the latest status on this?

2 Likes
#71

@anatoly Please could you provide an update? Do you have an estimated time frame on when the rent reduction will be in effect, that would be very helpful for planning

1 Like
#72

1.8 is still the target. Testnet is on 1.7 right now, and should go live to mainnet in a few weeks, and work on stabilizing 1.8 will begin after. don’t hold me to it, but maybe 2 month out?

1 Like
#74

Ok that’s promising. Can I ask if v1.8 does not actually decrease the cost of rent or is delayed, please can you make a fixed decrease to the current rent exemption cost? With an ecosystem of our size, this is really being a blocker to growth. 1M new users cost $250K in wallet creation just to onboard which is crazy. Once we have this sorted, we will fly.

3 Likes
#75

May i quote “1M new users cost $250K in wallet creation just to onboard which is crazy. Once we have this sorted, we will fly.” on twitter, Matt? :grinning:

1 Like
#76

Thank you for the above context @anatoly - this is currently the biggest blockage for using Solana at scale

@Matt-kf are you guys resizing accounts manually within JS? I know that function is still a bit off on the roadmap as well

1 Like
#77

Edit: Seems expected is ~10x decrease :fire:

1 Like
#78

I think this should be bumped and slightly prioritized a bit more. 1 SOL is now $190 and is slowly but surely going higher as this bull run continues.

3 Likes
#79

Some comments:

Definitely not, it’s going to be in local fiat. Where are they?

The hard cost is not only for storage, but for related activities ram, bandwidth etc… but I have no idea how to estimate that.

Question: if the rent exemption was lowered, do you think it should be allowed to get refunds for accounts with more in them than the new rent exemption?

Also, I think it would be technically very difficult to ever raise the rent exemption, unless there was technical changes to have a rent-exempt-flag on accounts, which isn’t the way it works now i think.

#80

i agree. should be bumped.

1 Like
#81

will 1.8 have fee reduction? if not whats the current plan? thx :slight_smile:

2 Likes