Forget What You Know About Fees. This Is Qubic
Written by
The Qubic Team
Dec 18, 2024
Transaction fees - the quiet cost of traditional blockchain operations. They play a fundamental role: organising the system, paying validators, discouraging spam and managing congestion. But they also create limits, making small transactions impractical and raising hurdles for new users. Qubic redefines this. Feeless transactions are built into the very essence of the network. This architecture renders QUBIC to QUBIC transfers inherently costless.
Why Do Fees Exist in Blockchain?
To appreciate the significance of Qubic’s feeless design, it's important to first understand why fees exist elsewhere. They tackle important problems:
Spam Prevention
Without fees, malicious users could flood the network with meaningless transactions, overwhelming the system and delaying legitimate activity. Fees create a barrier, forcing spammers to incur costs.Compensation for Validators
Validators on Proof of Stake - or miners on Proof of Work - are essential to traditional blockchains. They secure the network, verify transactions, and maintain records. Besides block rewards, fees reward their contributions.Traffic Regulation
When too many transactions compete for limited processing capacity, fees act as a prioritisation tool. Higher fees push transactions to the front of the queue, while lower-fee transactions must wait. It’s functional but often benefits wealthier participants.
Although fees address these needs, they come at a cost. Micropayments, such as tipping or small-scale transactions, become impractical. Fees can also spike unpredictably during periods of congestion, leaving users frustrated.
Consider a recent example: during the LayerZero airdrop, fees on major Layer 2 solutions like Arbitrum spiked above $10 per transaction.
For everyday users, these fluctuations make blockchain systems unreliable and costly, particularly when networks face sudden surges in activity.
How Feeless Transactions Work in Qubic
Qubic eliminates fees for QUBIC-to-QUBIC transactions. The system operates without fees, congestion penalties, or hidden costs. It achieves this through a combination of Computors, Useful Proof of Work (UPoW), and a structured emission model.
1. Computors: Qubic’s Validators
Qubic uses 676 Computors, specialised nodes that validate transactions and maintain network security. Unlike miners in traditional Proof of Work systems, Computors operate without relying on user fees.
How Is This Different From Miners?
In most blockchain networks, miners expend immense energy solving purposeless puzzles, competing to validate transactions and earn fees. This process, while secure, wastes resources and forces users to pay escalating fees during congestion.
Qubic’s Computors operate with no need for user fees. They reach consensus through a quorum-based model - 451 out of 676 must agree to finalise transactions - ensuring a decentralised, energy-efficient process.Emission-Based Compensation:
Instead of collecting transaction fees, Computors are rewarded through Qubic’s emission schedule. New QUBIC coins are distributed weekly, ensuring steady incentives for maintaining the network.
2. Useful Proof of Work (UPoW)
Traditional miners work to solve meaningless puzzles in systems like Bitcoin, consuming massive amounts of energy with little to no broader benefit. Qubic changes this entirely with Useful Proof of Work:
Purpose-Driven Computation:
Miners in Qubic direct their computational power toward meaningful, real-world tasks - creating and training AI models that provide external value. This work creates benefits beyond the network.Direct Compensation Without Fees:
Unlike miners who depend on fees or rewards from block production, Qubic miners are paid directly by Computors for their contributions. This fee-free design aligns incentives, ensuring computational resources are used efficiently while the network thrives.
Why It Matters: A Purposeful Difference
Qubic’s approach transforms both roles - Computors validate without fees and miners contribute with purpose. This not only reduces the energy waste seen in other systems but also eliminates unnecessary financial burdens on users. It’s a cleaner, more efficient, and intentional design.
Spam Prevention Without Costs to Users
Just because transactions are feeless doesn’t mean the network is defenseless. Qubic instead uses a method for blocking spam without charging users: Tick-Based Transaction Processing. Transactions are processed in predefined intervals, or “ticks,” ensuring a consistent flow of activity. This filters out invalid and repeated transactions and processes only valid ones to keep the network running smoothly.
The Impact of Feeless Transactions
Feeless transactions apply specifically to QUBIC-to-QUBIC transfers within the network. For other interactions, such as cross-chain transactions or third-party integrations, different rules may apply. Within this boundary, however, the benefits are substantial:
1. Practical Micropayments
Feeless transactions make small-value transfers viable. Whether it be tipping content creators, gaming, or enabling IoT micropayments, users keep the full value of their transactions without losing chunks to fees.
2. Lower Barriers for New Users
On most blockchains, users must acquire native tokens just to cover fees for every transaction, even for simple transfers. Qubic eliminates this for QUBIC-to-QUBIC transactions, which are entirely feeless. This means users can transfer QUBIC coins within the network without incurring additional costs or worrying about fluctuating fees.
Interacting with other assets or applications still requires QUBIC coins. For example, buying a different asset, engaging with dApps, or performing cross-chain transfers may necessitate holding QUBIC.
3. Consistency During Congestion
Fees on other blockchains spike during busy periods, pricing out users who can’t pay higher bids. Qubic eliminates this, allowing transactions to proceed uninterrupted.
4. Predictable Interactions
For QUBIC-to-QUBIC transfers, there are no fee estimators or sudden cost increases. The experience is seamless, reliable, and unaffected by network traffic.
Security in a Feeless System
Qubic’s architecture incorporates multiple layers of protection to block spam, fraud, and malicious actions.
Quorum Validation:
Transactions are finalised only after consensus from 451 Computors. This distributed process prevents bad actors from influencing outcomes.Fault Detection and Replacement:
Suspicious Computors are flagged, replaced, and excluded from further participation by the Arbitrator, maintaining the network’s integrity.Bare-Metal Infrastructure:
Computors operate directly on hardware, avoiding vulnerabilities tied to virtual machines or traditional operating systems.Tick-Based Spam Controls:
Tick processing limits transaction throughput in a controlled manner, filtering out junk while prioritising valid activity.Advanced Cryptography:
The network uses KangarooTwelve hashing and FourQ digital signatures to protect data from tampering or forgery.
Think of It as Qubic’s Email System
Email wasn’t always free. In its early days, every message sent was a cost - measured by the kilobyte. As infrastructure improved, those costs disappeared. Today, email flows freely, instantly, and without fees. Qubic applies a similar transformation to blockchain. Moving QUBIC is as easy as sending an email: no extra computations, no transaction costs, just a streamlined system.
Closing Perspective
The notion of including a fee with each transaction has been ingrained in the minds of blockchain users, and institutions, but Qubic seeks to challenge this long-held belief. Feeless QUBIC-to-QUBIC transactions reveal what’s possible when systems are designed for efficiency, accessibility, and real-world usability.
Forget fees. Forget unnecessary complications. This is Qubic.
In the next, and final, blog post of our "Forget What You Know" series, we’ll explore Qubic’s smart contracts and what makes them so unique.
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