Feature of the week: Sending feeless instant transactions between virtual accounts

Introducing Virtual Accounts, the ideal solution to settling transactions without incurring a fee.

Recording a transaction on the blockchain network incurs a certain transaction fee. That means it is not always beneficial to record these transactions on the network. Can you imagine incurring a $5 fee for a $10 transaction? It doesn’t make sense.

Tatum’s instant transactions between virtual accounts are the perfect solution to this problem, enabling users to settle such transactions immediately, with no blockchain fee incurred. Before showing you exactly how this works, let’s get some definitions out of the way.

What are Tatum Virtual Accounts?

Virtual accounts are a parallel layer that come with a carefully crafted selection of powerful out-of-the-box tools and features that can be used with the majority of the supported blockchains in Tatum. This suite of features addresses the challenge of scalability for legacy blockchains, acting as a parallel layer of advanced functionality that can be seamlessly integrated with Tatum’s native operations.

Virtual accounts feeless transactions: The benefits

While virtual accounts give you freedom in terms of virtual and fiat currencies, the ability to build full solutions that can integrate with any blockchain, and more, today we will be focusing on instant feeless transactions.

Using virtual accounts ensures that sending funds from one virtual account to another happens in a matter of milliseconds and costs nothing. One simple API call removes the expenses and delay in completing the transaction.

What’s important to note is that you can send as little as 1/1000000 of a Satoshi for Bitcoin or 1/1000000 of a Wei of Ethereum between virtual accounts. These microtransactions give a different level of freedom and customization to a developer/user.

How to set up virtual accounts

Now that you know the benefits of using virtual accounts, let’s move from idea to execution.

Each virtual account is assigned a currency. This can be either a cryptocurrency or virtual fiat currency. In this example, we will show you how to create virtual accounts for Polygon.

First, you must generate a wallet for Polygon. The following API call will generate a wallet for you:

The response to a successful call will contain the extended public key (xpub) of the wallet.

Using this xpub, we can now create a virtual account for Polygon with the following API call:

The parameters you’ll need to enter are:

• The currency (in this case MATIC)
• The xpub of the blockchain wallet
• A unique customer ID — this can be for an existing customer, or if no such customer ID has been previously created, it will create a new one.

The other parameters contained in the example code snippet above are optional, but can be useful for your own internal accounting processes.

Now we must create a blockchain deposit address that will be synchronized with our virtual account. It is possible to connect multiple blockchain addresses of the same currency to a virtual account, all of which will be automatically scanned for incoming transactions and synchronized.

Use the following API call to generate a blockchain deposit address connected to your virtual account:

How to send a feeless instant transaction

After you’ve created multiple virtual accounts and synchronized blockchain deposit addresses with them, you can send feeless instant transactions between virtual accounts.

The following API call will allow you to perform a transaction between 2 accounts with the same currency:

There’s a lot more you can do with these transactions such as getting the details of the transaction. You can also obtain a list of transactions for the specific account or find customer transactions across multiple accounts.

Check out our virtual account documentation to learn more about what you can do.

Ready to do all of this for free?

If what we just outlined has caught your attention, you can do it all using a free plan. Our free plans offer all available functionalities and you don’t have to upgrade to a paid plan unless you connect to a blockchain and require more than 5 API requests per second. For help getting started, check out our quick how-to.

To find out more about Virtual Accounts, please refer to our documentation and API documentation. It’s important to note that Tatum Virtual Accounts were previously referred to as Tatum Ledger, so any mention of the Ledger and Private Ledger should be taken as references to Tatum Virtual Accounts.

If you run into any problems and have any questions, need any help, or clarification, please drop us a line on the Tatum Discord , or the Tatum subreddit and we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.

Happy coding!