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Rent sponsorship is a built-in feature of the Light SDK’s that sponsors rent-exemption for all account types to reduce creation cost. This is dealt with under the hood in a way that doesn’t disrupt the UX of what your users are used to with SPL-token.Rent-exemption: sponsored by a rent sponsor PDA.Every Solana account requires a rent-exempt balance in SOL upon creation. A rent sponsor PDA by Light Protocol pays the rent-exemption cost for the account so account creators never lock up SOL for rent.Top-ups: paid by the fee payer.The feePayer on the transaction bumps a small virtual rent balance (766 lamports by default) on each write to keep the account active (hot balance). If you’re building a wallet or dApp, set your application as the fee payer and your users never pay rent or top-ups.
“Cold” accounts virtual rent balance below threshold (eg 24h without write bump) get auto-compressed. The cold account’s state is cryptographically preserved on the Solana ledger. Users can load a cold account into hot state in-flight when using the account again.
    Rent sponsor PDA              Fee payer bumps
    pays rent-exemption           virtual rent on write
         │                              │
         ▼                              │
    ┌─────────┐                    ┌────┴────┐
    │ CREATE  │ ──────────────────►│   HOT   │◄───┐
    └─────────┘                    └────┬────┘    │
                                        │         │
                                  no writes for   │ client loads
                                  threshold       │ cold → hot
                                  (e.g. 24h)      │
                                        │         │
                                        ▼         │
                                   ┌─────────┐    │
                                   │  COLD   │────┘
                                   └─────────┘

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How to use Sponsored Rent Top-Ups for Accounts and Transfers

To sponsor rent top-ups for your users, set the payer parameter to the sponsor’s public key when calling createTransferInterfaceInstructions (TypeScript) or building a TransferInterface instruction (Rust). The sponsor pays SOL for any rent top-ups while the user only signs to authorize the transfer.
You can set the payer to any signing account on any Light Token transaction.
import { Keypair, Transaction, sendAndConfirmTransaction } from "@solana/web3.js";
import { createRpc } from "@lightprotocol/stateless.js";
import {
    createAtaInterface,
    createLightTokenTransferInstruction,
    getAssociatedTokenAddressInterface,
} from "@lightprotocol/compressed-token";
import { PublicKey } from "@solana/web3.js";

const rpc = createRpc();

// Top-Up Sponsor: your application server, pays SOL for rent top-ups
const sponsor: Keypair = /* your server keypair */;

// User: only signs to authorize the transfer
const sender: Keypair = /* user's keypair */;
const recipient = new PublicKey(/* recipient address */);
const mint = new PublicKey(/* e.g. USDC mint */);

(async function () {
    const senderAta = getAssociatedTokenAddressInterface(mint, sender.publicKey);
    const recipientAta = getAssociatedTokenAddressInterface(mint, recipient);

    // Create recipient associated token account if it doesn't exist
    await createAtaInterface(rpc, sponsor, mint, recipient);

    const ix = createLightTokenTransferInstruction(
        senderAta,
        recipientAta,
        sender.publicKey,
        500_000,
        sponsor.publicKey, 
    );

    const tx = new Transaction().add(ix);
    const sig = await sendAndConfirmTransaction(rpc, tx, [sponsor, sender]);

    console.log("Tx:", sig);
})();

​
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