How to avoid high Ethereum gas fees
We all want to pay the lowest gas fees on Ethereum for our transactions. There are many ways to do this — using scaling solutions, using gas optimized dApps, etc but today we will be focusing on timing your transactions so that you pay the lowest Ethereum gas fees possible!
In short, gas fees on Ethereum fluctuate based on how many transactions are currently being submitted to the blockchain. Less transactions = lower fees. Therefore we want to pick the best time to do your transactions so that fees are the lowest. Below are a few websites you can use to help you.
- Etherscan (https://etherscan.io/gastracker)
Etherscan is useful when you want to see what are the current gas fees. Or to be more specific, the gas prices for the past 4 hours. If you click on the “Historical Gas Oracle Prices” tab, you can also see the most recent gas prices paid for the most recent blocks and for the past week.
(1 block on Ethereum = ~ 15s¹. Thus 1000 blocks = ~15,000 seconds = ~4hrs)
2. Ethereumprice (https://ethereumprice.org/gas/)
Ethereumprice shows you a nice chart that shows the gas price for the past week so that you can see the average range of gas prices.
But more importantly, they have a chart showing you the average gas prices every hour in your timezone using data from the past 2 weeks (compared to some other websites that only take data from the previous week, thus this should smooth out the data a bit more). It is also nicely colour coded so you can determine which days at which times are the best to transact at the lowest fees (whitest slots) while those in red were bad. Just note that this is not definitive — historical prices are not necessarily indicative of next week’s prices. But they can be useful as a general guide — eg for my timezone it is generally more expensive to transact from 12mn to 11am as compared to between 2pm to 5pm.
3. Blocknative (https://www.blocknative.com/gas-estimator)
This is the default toggle you will see on Blocknative and you might be surprised to see a very high max fee. The reason for this is because Blocknative doubles the base fee to ensure that transaction will pass for six consecutive 100% full blocks. To view the actual base fee which is more in line with the other websites, click the EIP 1559 toggle on the top right corner instead.
This view settings bring the gas price to be more in line with what other gas trackers are showing. In normal situations, setting a priority fee of 2.0 is sufficient in addition to the base fee quoted.
Blocknative also has a chrome extension that allows you to monitor gas prices easily which I personally also use.
In summary, using a combination of the three sites should allow you to get an estimate of the best time to perform your transactions on Ethereum. And if you want to do them now, maybe just take look at the gas fees for previous few hours — it could be that prices are high now because there is some NFT drop going on and it might be prudent to just wait an hour or so to let those fees come down before you transact.
Other websites you could use to track gas prices:
https://etherchain.org/tools/gasnow
https://gasinfo.io/
https://ethgas.watch/
