It surprises most teams once: a wallet holds plenty of USDT, and the payout still fails. The reason is that a token transfer pays its network fee in the network's native coin, ETH on Ethereum, BNB on BNB Chain, TRX on Tron, POL on Polygon. No native coin, no transfer.
Where it bites
- Payout wallets that only ever receive stablecoins.
- Sweeps from customer deposit addresses: a customer sends 500 USDT to their address, and that address holds no native coin to move it on.
- Busy days, when fees rise and a small native balance runs out mid-batch.
A gas wallet
In Valtu you choose one operational wallet as your workspace's gas wallet and fund it with each network's native coin. Then, per network, you decide what it may do:
- Sponsor payouts: before a token payout is built, the gas wallet sends the paying wallet exactly the fee it is missing; the payout waits for it.
- Fund sweeps: token sweeps out of customer addresses get their fee the same way.
- Refill automatically: operational wallets that fall below a level you choose are topped back up.
Every top-up is an ordinary, recorded transfer, so it appears in your history and goes through the same signing rules. A daily cap per network bounds what the gas wallet can spend, and you're warned when its own balance runs low.
Tron is different
On Tron, token transfers spend energy rather than a simple fee. Without energy they burn TRX instead, which works but costs more. Valtu can rent energy through your own provider key when that's cheaper. See TRON energy and bandwidth, explained.
Bitcoin needs none of this
Bitcoin pays its fee out of the coins being sent, so there is nothing to top up. See Bitcoin on Valtu.