How is the Stellar base reserve handled for one time stealth accounts?

[10xAlien]

Since every receive derives a fresh Stellar account, each one needs the minimum base reserve to exist on the network, so I am curious how that is handled in practice. Does the sender cover the reserve as part of the payment, and can the recipient reclaim it when sweeping funds to their main wallet, or is it effectively lost on every transfer? A short note on the expected cost per stealth payment would help me understand the overhead before I test this on testnet.

[collinsadi]

The sender covers it: creating each stealth account uses a CreateAccount op funded with at least 2 base reserves, currently 0.5 XLM each, so 1 XLM, and that amount is locked rather than spent. The recipient reclaims all of it at sweep time by using ACCOUNT_MERGE instead of a payment, which moves the full balance including the reserve into the main wallet and deletes the account, since a normal payment cannot drop an account below its minimum.

So the real cost per stealth payment is only fees, 100 stroops (0.00001 XLM) per operation at network minimum, roughly 0.00002 XLM for the create plus merge, plus the Soroban announcement transaction.

The one exception is non native assets, where each trustline adds another 0.5 XLM subentry and the account cannot merge until you move the token out and remove the trustline first.