How does Solana's Rent Fee work? What is it exactly? And why 2 years?

Question

I've been reading about this "rent fee" feature on Solana. What is this exactly and how does it work? Coming from BTC and ETH. Why do I need to pay "rent" on Solana?

Answer 1

You can think of it as a mechanism to prevent people from DDosing the data storage. The more storage you require, the more SOL you need to lockup.

When you deposit more than 2 years of rent, your account is rent exempted. Actually most projects are using the rent exemption amount by default. Also, you can check the amount of rent you need to provide by using the following command.

solana rent <SIZE>

There are not a lot of use-cases where you would want to deposit less than the rent exemption amount since you can get your SOL back when you don't need the account anymore.

You can read more here.

Answer 2

This document will explain it.

https://docs.solana.com/developing/programming-model/accounts#rent

Answer 3

Here's the updated link, after Solana updated their docs structure: https://solana.com/docs/core/fees#rent