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Can I send 1 lovelace (0.000001 ADA) to another address or is there a minimum amount I need to send?

Of course there will also be the transaction fee of (currently) ~0.16 ADA, so such a transaction would not make much sense in most cases. Still I'm curious if it would work.

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3 Answers 3

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There is a minimum UTxO transaction size of 1 ADA not including fees. That means the absolute minimum transaction is 1 ADA + fees.

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    Is there any information why this is the case? This might become a bit of a problem in case the price keeps rising.
    – eddex ♦
    Commented May 20, 2021 at 10:10
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    It is to reduce dust/lots of small UTxOs and goes back to when ADA was $0.02. I've seen people mention plans to make this value change dynamically, or to have a vote on changing it. You can find more information here cardano-ledger.readthedocs.io/en/latest/explanations/…
    – Eddy Schauman-Haigh
    Commented May 20, 2021 at 10:37
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    I am really curious about upcoming changes to all parameters that go back to when ada was rather cheap. Minimum transaction size and especially transaction cost are two very important examples and it will be interesting to see how a change or vote will actually look like.
    – Peter1807
    Commented May 20, 2021 at 23:13
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    Is 'gas' a thing in Cardano? I think only Ethereum has 'gas'. Like Bitcoin, Cardano just has tx fees.
    – Joshua Chia
    Commented May 21, 2021 at 1:25
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    Seems like a tx-fee cash grab. Good for the network validators, bad for users. I understand if a transaction should have a minimum in total but having a minimum per output in a tx only decreases the utility of the chain.. i.e. no micro-transactions and multi-asset development isn't cost-effective. Cardano shouldn't focus on layer-1 problems and should instead think about actual layer-2 utility, imo
    – irth
    Commented Jul 4, 2022 at 13:01
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A configurable network parameter called minimum_utxo_value is responsible for this. As the ADA price rises, the quantity field, expressed in lovelaces, will get lower and lower. Today, 21st October 2021, this value is 0.999978 ADA.

"minimum_utxo_value": {
    "quantity": 999978,
    "unit": "lovelace"
}

In order to see Cardano network's parameters, you need to execute a network command of the cardano-wallet utility (you must first run cardano-node and server).

cardano-wallet network parameters
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In addition to fees (txFeePerByte + txFeeFixed) as shown in the protocol parameters below, you can see that there is as well a minUTxOValue field that specifies the lowest UTxO output.

Therefore, a transaction cannot contain less than txFeePerByte + txFeeFixed + minUTxOValue. These three parameters can be changed once governance is active.

Protocol parameters

    "txFeePerByte": 44,
    "minUTxOValue": 1000000,
    "stakePoolDeposit": 500000000,
    "decentralization": 0,
    "poolRetireMaxEpoch": 18,
    "extraPraosEntropy": null,
    "stakePoolTargetNum": 500,
    "maxBlockBodySize": 65536,
    "maxTxSize": 16384,
    "treasuryCut": 0.2,
    "minPoolCost": 340000000,
    "maxBlockHeaderSize": 1100,
    "protocolVersion": {
        "minor": 0,
        "major": 4
    },
    "txFeeFixed": 155381,
    "stakeAddressDeposit": 2000000,
    "monetaryExpansion": 3.0e-3,
    "poolPledgeInfluence": 0.3
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