[ProjectTracking]: Non refundable storage

[walnut-the-cat]

Goals

Creating new accounts on chain costs a gas fee and a storage staking fee. The more state is added to the account, the higher the storage staking fees. When deploying a contract on the account, it can quickly go above 1 NEAR per account.

Some business models are okay with paying that fee for users upfront, just to get them onboarded. However, if a business does that today, their users can delete their new accounts and spend the tokens intended for storage staking in other ways. Since this is free for the user, they are financially incentivized to repeat this action for as long as the business has funds left in the faucet.

The protocol should allow to create accounts in a way that is not susceptible to such refund abuse. This would at least change the incentives such that creating fake users is no longer profitable.

Non-refundable storage staking is a further improvement over https://github.com/near/NEPs/pull/448 (Zero Balance Accounts) which addressed the same issue but is limited to 770 bytes per account. By lifting the limit, sponsored accounts can be used in combination with smart contracts.

Links to external documentations and discussions

• NEP-491

Estimated effort

LoE: ~1 week Target Date: Mid Jan

Assumptions

All the assumption and the reasoning for this are one NEP proposal document referenced in external documentation.

Pre-requisites

There are no prerequisites

Out of scope

• Propagating the work on other parts of the stack:
  • drivers,
  • UI interface to show non-refundable balance

[walnut-the-cat]

December 18th

• NEP is approved on December 15th with several change requests
• Project is transferred to Adam from Jure.
• Adam will update NEP and apply requested changes to implementation details.

[staffik]

2024-02-05 status update:

• We have implementation reviewed by 3 reviewers and ready to merge.
• But we are waiting on a resolution of a question to Coinbase.
  • "Should we show non-refundable balance as balance in Rosetta RPC adapter?"

[walnut-the-cat]

@staffik , I see that the PR is now merged. Are we done with the project?

[staffik]

@staffik , I see that the PR is now merged. Are we done with the project?

There is 1 tiny task that I decided to do as a follow up to push the main PR faster. And then we need to stabilize the feature.

[staffik]

2024-02-26 status update:

• Merged main PR: https://github.com/near/nearcore/pull/9600.
• What it is left is:
  • Minor task: different cost parameters for Transfer and NonrefundableStorageTransfer.
  • Stabilization.
• A discussion arised, whether do we want to burn token immediately and add permanent_storage_bytes field instead: https://github.com/near/NEPs/pull/491#issuecomment-1961479089

[staffik]

2024-03-11 status update:

• Agreed to use permanent storage bytes, confirmed the change with Coinbase.
• Changed implementation to use permanent storage bytes: https://github.com/near/nearcore/pull/10701. PR has been approved, will merge after resolution of PR discussions.

[walnut-the-cat]

@staffik , what's the status? Are we done?

[staffik]

2024-04-08 status update:

• Merged https://github.com/near/nearcore/pull/10701.
• Still waiting on a resolution of a question (see comment).
• @walnut-the-cat in the meantime there is one minor task that I will do: https://github.com/near/nearcore/issues/10977.

[walnut-the-cat]

@staffik ,

Still waiting for reply regarding CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.

Who should able to provide an answer on this?