Transaction Fee
Plain English
A small amount you pay for each transaction to cover the cost of processing it on the blockchain. On Solana, fees are extremely low (around $0.000005) compared to other blockchains like Ethereum which can charge $10-100 per transaction.
Technical
Fees paid to validators for including transactions in blocks and executing computational operations. On Solana, fees consist of: base fee (5000 lamports ≈ $0.000005 SOL per signature) plus compute unit pricing. Low fees result from high throughput and efficient architecture. Fees prevent spam and incentivize validators.