Pricing
Permanence starts at 25 cents.
Two ways to store bytes on the X1 chain. One keeps them forever and can never be pruned; the other is nearly free. Either way, the storage is a refundable deposit — the fee is the only money you ever spend.
1Two storage tiers
Same chain, two different guarantees. Pick based on how long the bytes need to survive and what you want to pay to hold them.
- Bytes live in rent-exempt accounts.
- Held hot by every validator.
- Retrievable from any node, no history needed.
- Cannot be pruned.
Built and verified locally; not yet deployed to mainnet.
- Bytes live in transaction history.
- Validators prune history on a rolling window.
- Retrieval requires an archival node.
- Nearly free to store.
Live now. The film proves it: Night of the Living Dead (1968), 1.86 GB — uploaded, retrieved twice, SHA-256 verified.
2The fee
The fee is a small percentage of the storage cost, and the rate drops as the file gets bigger.
fee = max(0.25 XNT, rate × cost)3The numbers
Measured on X1. Rent sysvar: 6,960 lamports/byte, exemption threshold 1.0 year. Archive cost = bytes × 6,960 lamports. Ledger cost = (bytes / 900) × 81,500 lamports — measured at 900 bytes per chunk transaction. All amounts in XNT.
| File | Archive (permanent) | Ledger (cheap) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cost | fee | cost | fee | |
| 1 KB | 0.01 XNT | 0.25 | ~0 | 0.25 |
| 100 KB | 0.71 XNT | 0.25 | 0.01 | 0.25 |
| 1 MB | 7.30 XNT | 0.365 | 0.09 | 0.25 |
| 10 MB | 72.98 XNT | 3.649 | 0.95 | 0.25 |
| 100 MB | 729.81 XNT | 29.192 | 9.50 | 0.380 |
| 1 GB | 7,473.24 XNT | 224.197 | 97.23 | 2.917 |
| 1.86 GB | 12,963.07 XNT | 259.261 | 168.66 | 3.373 |
- Cost is the rent deposit — see below for how it comes back.
- Fee is the only money actually spent.
- The 1.86 GB row is the sealed film — a real, complete file on mainnet today.
4What you actually pay
This is the part that matters most.
The storage cost is a refundable deposit.
It is designed as a refundable deposit — the rent backing the file comes back when the file is later closed. The withdraw/close instruction that returns it is not live yet; it ships with the storage upgrade. Until then, treat the deposit as committed, not yet spendable.
The fee is the only money actually spent.
Permanence starts at 25 cents.
5Why the 25-cent floor
The minimum fee is not about making money. It is the only thing standing between the chain and a flood of junk bytes.
“A 1 KB upload costs us about 0.0001 XNT in rent. The 0.25 XNT minimum means spam pays ~2,500× what it costs to serve. Real users pay a quarter and never notice.”
Measured on the ledger tier — the cheapest way to store a byte.
Start with the toolkit
One command-line tool, zero dependencies. Download the sealed film, or use it to build your own stamps.
Get the toolkit →