To my knowledge the next release will be the one where we'll actually pay fees for invocations with correct metering. Does soroban plan on having a mechanism like Ethereum's storage refund which would incentivize developers to free up storage slots by refunding gas when these are freed up? It's my understanding that soroban takes a more solana-approach for fees, i.e fees are determined by the computational resources required to process the transaction rather than actual storage usage, but I also know that Soroban will disincentivize taking up lots of storage for a later usage, for example selling storage, cc: @random silo . So my question would be if there is something like Ethereum's storage refund model, which would also allow for possibly cheaper transactions by introducing contracts similar to 1Inch's CHI gastoken?
#Soroban Storage Refund System?
spare stag
subtle fiber
@rich delta
I believe in the current iteration we don't do any refunds - it would be nice in concept, but there are some fairness issues and misuse potential. e.g. consider a contract creating a TotallyNecessaryBalance entry for a user and asking them for 6 months of advance rent. after the user creates that, the contract owner just deletes the entry and takes all the rent balance.
basically the conceptual issue is that unlike the token operations, the fee withdrawal is kind of implied as a part of transaction cost. but refunds suddenly add some token-like behavior to it (i.e. one party might do the deposit and another party might do the withdrawal) without any special authorization
rich delta
Yeah we don't plan on doing refunds. I think the issue is that refunds offer a cleanup incentive after the entry has already been created and requires explicit action on the user's part. Instead, we have a novel rent system that charges for storage and removes entries from the ledger when they run out of rent (but they can be recovered later by paying a restoration fee). We also incentivize the use of a temporary self deleting entry type whenever possible by offering a discounted rent rate for self deleting entries to further promote storage hygiene. We have actually designed the system intentionally to make fee gaming contracts like eth's gas token impossible. Things like gas tokens are actually very harmful to network health. The point of variable fees is to charge more for resources when they are in high demand. Not only does gas token remove this demand based approach by exploiting the refund structure, it also encourages users to buy up storage they won't use just to refund it later, which is also a big hit to network performance.
I think we do a much better job than Solana and eth when it comes to storage fees, so we don't need to offer refunds to incentivize good behavior since the protocol forces good behavior and charges for behavior that reduces network performance. For more details here's a high level doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xxg7bh2vl7gZ6DPtaIvIMYCeggwstpG0aRwgKkKMy9k/edit
subtle fiber
I think we still don't fully solve everything: e.g. it would be nice to encourage removal of restorable entries as the archive nodes aren't completely free. but yeah, in general we seem to be in a decent spot and hopefully don't need additional incentives to prevent spam