Prevents dust accounts from bloating state.
Current Value
Conversion: ÷ 10^9 (RAO → TAO)
The Big Picture
Substrate chains don't keep empty accounts forever - they cost storage. The existential deposit is the minimum balance to keep your account alive. Drop below it, and your account gets 'reaped' (deleted). This keeps the chain lean but means you must watch your minimums.
Why This Matters
If your balance drops below this, your account is deleted and any remaining dust is lost. Always keep at least this amount, or use transfer_keep_alive to prevent accidental reaping.
Example
The existential deposit is 500 RAO (0.0000005 TAO). If you have 400 RAO and try to send 100 RAO, the transfer succeeds but your account is reaped. You lose the remaining 300 RAO.
Common Questions
- What happens to my dust when reaped?
- It's gone forever. The balance below ED is lost, not redistributed.
- Can I recover a reaped account?
- The address still works - just send it tokens again (at least ED) to recreate. But any previous dust and your nonce are gone.
From Chain Metadata
The minimum amount required to keep an account open. MUST BE GREATER THAN ZERO! If you *really* need it to be zero, you can enable the feature `insecure_zero_ed` for this pallet. However, you do so at your own risk: this will open up a major DoS vector. In case you have multiple sources of provider references, you may also get unexpected behaviour if you set this to zero. Bottom line: Do yourself a favour and make it at least one!
Use Cases
- Account creation
- Transfer validation
Code Examples
import { createClient, Binary } from "polkadot-api";
import { getWsProvider } from "polkadot-api/ws";
import { sub } from "@polkadot-api/descriptors"; // generated by: npx papi add sub -w wss://entrypoint-finney.opentensor.ai:443
const client = createClient(getWsProvider("wss://entrypoint-finney.opentensor.ai:443"));
const api = client.getTypedApi(sub);
// Query ExistentialDeposit constant
const value = await api.constants.Balances.ExistentialDeposit();
console.log("ExistentialDeposit:", value);
// Balance: divide by 10^9 for TAO
const tao = value / 1_000_000_000n;Type Information
- Type
- TaoBalance
- Byte Size
- variable bytes
- Encoding
- composite
- Raw Hex
- 0xf401000000000000
Version History
Runtime Info
- Pallet
- Balances
- First Version
- v101
- Latest Version
- v101
- Current Runtime
- v472