In our series exploring Cardano's more than 30 network parameters, we turn our attention to price_mem, the critical counterpart to price_step that determines how much users pay for memory consumption in smart contract operations. While price_step governs computational processing costs, price_mem sets the price for memory allocation. This means every byte of data storage, variable declaration, and intermediate computation that Plutus scripts require during execution. As of this writing, the current value is 577/10,000 lovelace per memory unit.

What is it

The price_mem parameter establishes the cost per memory unit consumed by Cardano smart contracts during execution. Unlike simple ada transfers that have minimal memory overhead, smart contracts often require substantial memory allocation to store intermediate values,…