Can you include a minting policy in a transaction without minting or burning any tokens?

Question

I want to use the minting policy to abstract the script logic away from the validator and only validate what's necessary for a specific transaction. Right now, I'm able to do this by minting a token I call ticket and creating the validator in such a way that it makes sure this tokens is being minted.

Since my purpose is not to mint a token, this ends up increasing the transaction size without any added value so I wonder if it's possible to include the minting policy in the transaction, verify that somehow in the validator, but not mint or burn any tokens.

Answer 1

I had a similar issue where I needed to break up the validator logic to keep under the maxTx size limits. I was able to do this by testing for the presence of threadtokens so that each of validators could "communicate" with each other. I also implemented some performance improvements that reduce the overhead as well.

The project is called The Open Source Cardano Lottery and you can checkout the source code here:

https://github.com/lley154/cardano-lottery

Answer 2

I know I'm not answering your exact question, but I think I can help you achieve your goal of "abstracting the script logic from the validator and only validate what's necessary for a specific transaction." Plutus pioneer program cohort #3 week 1's code is a good example of this

https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program/blob/main/code/week01/src/Week01/EnglishAuction.hs

You'll see that Lars used a custom data type for his redeemer, that allowed him to have different logic for whether the validator script was called with the intention of bidding or closing the auction.