Is rent collected on Solana?

Question

1. I have created a wallet account that holds my SOL balance and only sends and receives SOL. Will there be rent on this account? E2B5PspC2A3UVsfyQhrzhFBwb23RMEiMrFsG3Zoy6QfR (testnet)

When I made a request to getAccountInfo API with this account, rentEpoch and space returned 0.

Since space is 0, I assume that the amount of data is 0. However, when I request getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption API, it returns results like {"jsonrpc": "2.0", "result":890880, "id":1}.

2. Will the rent payment remain in the transaction history?

3. I understand that if I have 2 years worth of rent in my balance, I will be exempted from paying it. 1 epoch is about 2 days, so 365 days / 2 days * getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption result would be the equivalent?

Answer 1

1. Yes there will be rent on this account. I think you have a misconception of how rent works here. Even though your account doesn't store any additional bytes (i.e. why space is 0), validators still have to track that a) your account exists and b) it has a balance of x lamports. For this reason, you have to have some minimum amount of lamports in your balance for rent exemption. Like you already mentioned, you can find this using getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption or just solana rent 0 on the CLI.
2. Rent per-se isn't a thing anymore. Nowadays Solana doesn't allow you to create accounts that have less than the rent exempt amount. Until recently, this was only relevant for old accounts that had fallen below there rent-exempt amount before this was implemented, however as of today there are no accounts with less than their rent-exempt amount. For this reason, SIMD-0084 is being deployed to remove rent collection altogether.
3. I think 2. answers this for the most part. Nowadays I think it makes most sense to think in terms of rent exemption as just being a minimum balance you need to maintain.

Side note: If you're interested in learning more about rent as it works today (since docs are a bit outdated), I recommend Nick Frostbutter's thread on it from a few weeks ago: https://twitter.com/nickfrosty/status/1727060521608974573