Do Empty System Accounts require initialization before receiving SOL?

Question

When I transfer SOL from my wallet to a PDA (~1000 Lamports). I get

Transaction simulation failed: Transaction results in an account (2) without insufficient funds for rent

Do I need to initialize my System Account PDA before sending the SOL?

Answer 1

Every account on Solana needs to have lamports equal to at least the minimum rent exemption i.e. 2 years worth of rent. Otherwise, the validators will drop the account.

Since System Account doesn't hold any data, you can quickly check the rent exempt requirement using solana-cli:

solana rent 0
Rent per byte-year: 0.00000348 SOL
Rent per epoch: 0.000002439 SOL
Rent-exempt minimum: 0.00089088 SOL

So you need to send at least 890880 lamports to a System account. Any amount below this doesn't fulfill the rent-exemption limit and the transaction won't go through.

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Note: Once you transfer the ownership of the account to a PDA, it is no longer a System account. Your program becomes the owner of the account but the rent condition remains the same as long as the length of data is 0.