Weight and fees

The resources available to a blockchain are limited, so it's important to manage how operations on-chain use them. Not managing how resources are used can open an attack vector, known as DoS (Denial of Service), where an attacker floods the chain with operations in order to get it to stop producing blocks. In order to manage how resources are used and to protect against DoS attacks, XCM uses a concept of weight. This concept, which has the purpose of quantifying usage of blockchain resources, comes from the Substrate world.

Weight is two-dimensional, it tracks both time (execution time) and space (state accesses). Weight determines how much fees need to be paid in order to perform some operation. The logic for turning it into fees is configurable.

Some systems have the concept of gas metering, which is calculated during execution and only measures execution time. Weight, however, is static, defined beforehand, which makes XCM execution lighter by not including gas metering.

The principle behind weight payment is to pay for what you use, so the two stages of XCM where fees are paid are sending the message and actually executing it. The fees for sending are paid on the local system, usually by the origin of the message, because we are using the message delivery mechanism maintained by the origin. Similarly, the execution fees are paid on the destination system, via the BuyExecution instruction. In other words, XCMs are paid for via their own instructions. We'll talk more about BuyExecution in the fee handling chapter.

XCM is agnostic, which means it doesn't assume fees need to be paid. It's entirely possible to not pay for the effects of an XCM on the destination system. Even in systems where fees have to be paid, special cases of free execution can be made. There are security measures systems can put in place (see barrier) to not execute XCMs that do not pay for their fees.

Executor config

The executor has a Weigher configuration item that specifies the weight of each instruction. It weighs the whole message by adding the weight of each instruction. A simple way of weighing instructions is to assign them a base weight value to all of them. This works, but it is not very accurate, as different instructions use more resources when being executed. A better approach is to benchmark each instruction to find out the actual weight used by each.

Another configuration item, Trader, converts the required weight units into fees, which are represented as MultiAssets. There are two basic approaches: one is to just assign a value (measured in assets) to each unit of weight; the other is to reuse some existing transaction payment method for XCM weight. Custom configurations allow for things like NFT coupons that give you a certain amount of weight for executing the XCM.

Naturally, this configuration items allow for any approach you can think of for weighing messages and charging execution fees.

XCM pallet

FRAME pallets, like the XCM pallet, specify weights for each extrinsic they expose. That means that when interacting with pallets that deal with XCM, there will be an additional fee at the beginning for calling the extrinsic locally.