All About Ethereum Gas Fees and How to Set Your Own Gas Prices

One of the most frequently asked questions in the space is why gas prices are so high, so we decided to create a guide on how to set your own gas price. We see a lot of people overpaying for gas, so hopefully this guide will help you.

What Is Gas

Every DApp built on Ethereum today makes its users pay the cost of transactions, called gas for the Ethereum blockchain. Gas in blockchain technology refers to a transaction fee, or pricing value, required to successfully conduct a transaction or execute a contract on the smart contract. Gas is priced in fractions of the cryptocurrency commonly known as gwei and sometimes as nanoeth. The gas is used to allocate Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) resources, allowing decentralized applications such as smart contracts to self-execute.

How gas fees are calculated

Every action performed on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) incurs a gas cost, such as:

• Adding two numbers,
• Gas spent during a transaction eg Buying, listing or minting an NFT. This is where the high gas costs for NFTs originate.
• Smart contracts combine multiple operations with associated gas costs, equating to 100,000s of Gas spent in extreme cases.

The cost is measured. in GWEI, with one GWEI equaling 0.000000001ETH. The transaction fee is calculated by multiplying the Gas cost of an interaction by the Gas price (GWEI) at the time of the interaction. For example, if an interaction with a Gas costs 15,000 Gas at a time when the price is estimated to be 200 GWEI, yields 3 million GWEI, equaling 0.003ETH.

How the Speed of a transaction is processed.

Because there are many people constantly using the Ethereum chain, the higher you set your GWEI, the further you are in a queue, as the miners processing transactions will look for the highest paying customer first. Most commonly used wallets (such as Metamask) have transaction options called “fast,” “medium,” and “slow,” which allow you to set your GWEI at higher/lower cost points and, as a result, higher/lower speeds.

For example,

1. Lower speed: If the average GWEI is estimated to be 100 GWEI and you set your GWEI to 85, you will have to wait for GWEI levels to settle to a point where a miner will find your bid of 70 desirable. This is where the time impact comes in; if GWEI never settles to 85 or below, your transaction will remain pending or potentially fail if enough time has passed, for example, during the minting of an NFT.
2. Higher speed: If the average GWEI is 100 GWEI and you set your GWEI to 150, you are effectively jumping the queue and putting your transaction at the highest value compared to everyone else on the Ethereum blockchain; as a result, your transaction becomes the most desirable to a miner and will be completed much faster. This is how people ensure they can mint projects that sell out quickly, especially during times of high demand such as NFT Minting on the Ethereum chain.

Tracking Gas Fees

GWEI fluctuates constantly in response to the amount of activity on the blockchain. Gas tracking is critical for cost reduction. If you are not performing a time-sensitive transaction, such as sending eth, WL mint with a large timeframe, listing an NFT, or buying an NFT on secondary, then waiting until GWEI estimates are low/action on the Ethereum chain is “pleasant” can save you a lot of money. Fortunately, there are tools for tracking current prices, typical trends for lower gas prices, and viewing historical GWEI values.

You can use a Gas Tracker tools such as to get current GWEI estimates:

• Gas Tracker: Precise insight into current GWEI prices.
• Ethereum Price: Historical data and a heatmap of when GWEI is typically lower.

Modifying Gas Fees

Tracking gas fees is not always beneficial for time-sensitive actions such as minting high demand projects (which often sell out in minutes), sniping rares on reveal, and jumping into projects with high volume and rapidly increasing in value. This is when gas prices tend to rise, and you’ll want to raise your GWEI to compete for transaction “speed.”

Modifying Gas Controls is risky and should only be done if you truly understand, but risks are always associated with this. There are three variables to consider and manipulate:

• Gas Limit (unit): Is the most you’re willing to spend on gas in order to complete a transaction. Never change this; it is not something you can define in terms of a transaction/smart contract; doing so may render your transaction useless and result in a financial loss.
• Maximum priority fee, aka “miner tip”: is paid to the miner/validator to incentivize them to prioritize your transaction. The first thing you can change is the incentive to miners, which affects the cost of your transaction. Higher = faster + costlier while Lower = faster and less expensive.
• Maximum Fee: This is another variable that can be changed, it is the total cost of your transaction (Priority Fee + Base Fee). This compensates for current GWEI levels and typically goes towards your base fee costs, with the remainder going to priority fee costs (a setting of 1.5–2 is the typical standard for “quick” transactions).

If you use a hardware wallet, such as a Ledger or a Trezor, the interface may differ slightly (legacy gas price mode). It may only display the Gas Limit and the Gas Price. Simply set the gas price to whatever amount you are willing to pay in this case, and treat it as the same as the Max fee in the regular gas screens shown above.

The “Speed Up” option for the transaction is available, so if the network remains congested for much longer than expected and you are unable to complete the transaction by the deadline, you can always speed up the process by pressing Speed Up and setting a new gas price. Because you can always speed up transactions later, it’s always worth starting with a low gas price and then increasing it later if necessary.

What is the Best Way to Modify Gas Fees

The best way to modify your fees is in tandem with one another. Raising both allows compensation for the base fee increase while also providing an incentive to the miner. Modifying these fees separately has the following limitations:

• Maximum Fee in Isolation: If the base fee increases, the maximum fee can compensate, but without the miner incentive.
• Priority Fee in Isolation: Increased miner incentive, but if the base fee rises, the miner tip will be reduced to keep the total fee lower than the maximum fee.

Max Priority fee tool:

Blocknative is a great tool to use in conjunction with the etherscan tracker to determine the best setting for your max priority fee and max fee:

Gas fees Tutorials

• NFT Gas Fees Guide — (9+ min)
• Advanced Metamask Gas Tutorial: How to Set Your Own Gas Prices (38+ mins)

Originally published at http://retrocanvasdesign.wordpress.com on September 9, 2022.