Storage Cost Decrease - 7/21/21

Announcements
1

On Friday, 7/9/21, we announced an increase to the Account Minimum Balance to 0.04 FLOW that would go into effect with the MainNet spork on July 21 (MainNet 11). After hearing direct feedback from developers across the ecosystem, we will no longer be increasing the Account Minimum Balance.

The intention of raising the Account Minimum Balance was to ensure accounts could store more NFTs by default, reducing the friction for both users and developers having to top up storage fees frequently. After a thorough analysis of recent improvements to Flow’s storage layer and identifying additional near-term optimizations, we are confident in increasing the account storage by default with the same min. account balance of 0.001 FLOW. In summary, accounts will start with 100KB of storage instead of 10KB, which should be enough to store hundreds of NFTs on most dapps.

Direct community feedback encouraged this re-evaluation, we appreciate everyone’s candour in the process.

So, as of the July 21 spork, we are significantly decreasing the cost of storage to a rate of 100KB for 0.001 FLOW. This means accounts will now store 10x the amount of data at the exact same cost to create an account as previously established. No action is required to enable this, and the Account Minimum Balance will remain at 0.001 FLOW.

We apologize for any stress the initial increase to Account Minimum Balance announcement may have caused to those building on Flow, and are extremely appreciative of the clear and direct feedback we received from the community.

It was not a light decision because we had to make sure the network could sustain this new pricing model in the long-term. However, the optimizations we have identified for the storage layer gave us the confidence to lower the costs. Hopefully this new direction is an exciting outcome for the community.

As a recap:

  • Account Minimum Balance will continue to be 0.001 FLOW
  • The cost of storage is being decreased. 0.001 FLOW will now hold 100KB worth of NFTs
  • This will go into effect with the July 21, 2021 spork (MainNet 11)
  • No action is required

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to our team directly.

Thank you,
The Flow Team :ocean: