Small payments have a big fee

General
1

I tried to simulate a small payment (around $3) to see if using Ark for everyday purchases like coffee or groceries would be viable. However, I noticed that the transaction fee was quite high (40% of the payment). Are there any plans for improvements?


  {
    "id": 11,
    "destination": null,
    "fees": 0,
    "spends": [],
    "receives": [
      {
        "id": "30445d7825c79c097d0def262880d5cbf69daa16d7e01ba53e757510243bcf51:0",
        "amount_sat": 3125
      }
    ],
    "created_at": "2025-04-10 16:10:34.788"
  },
  {
    "id": 10,
    "destination": "03d72d8a1ef77c54db378a1658478c0989a9868ef0fdc769802a9d077814bf19ef",
    "fees": 1270,
    "spends": [
      {
        "id": "dd7475edc77ae67e39ac367235343899d9b8243ca45ce3ebf21df3535f6c3dea:1",
        "amount_sat": 16457
      },
      {
        "id": "dd7475edc77ae67e39ac367235343899d9b8243ca45ce3ebf21df3535f6c3dea:0",
        "amount_sat": 800
      }
    ],
    "receives": [
      {
        "id": "30445d7825c79c097d0def262880d5cbf69daa16d7e01ba53e757510243bcf51:1",
        "amount_sat": 12862
      }
    ],
    "created_at": "2025-04-10 16:10:29.527"
  },
]
2

Was that using a Lightning payment or a regular Ark payment?

1270 seems pretty high, yeah, in practice on mainnet we are definitely aiming for way lower fees.

One aspect of this is currently that for each payment (which involves creating a new off-chain tx), you need to create a fee anchor output to guarantee your unilateral exit. They cost 330 sats each, so every payment is going to include a 330 fee that goes there.

Soon we can remove this requirement, and use 0-value fee anchors instead. However 1270 is very high still. We use some preset hard-coded values for our lightning routing fee, that might also contribute to this.

3

I executed bark vtxo-pubkey and then send the sats to that address, no LN involved