What are gas fees and why don’t you need ETH to trade on Ethereum with Bebop?
You navigate to [insert decentralized exchange here] and begin a trade. You select the tokens you want and are ready to hit “Swap”… only to realize that you don’t actually have enough ETH in your wallet to cover the network fees. Damn.
Now you need to transfer ETH from another wallet or centralized exchange account. Or worse, pay massive fees to buy ETH with your credit card. You forget what you even started this journey for.
Too far? Hopefully, you get the point.
Not anymore. On Bebop, you don’t need any ETH to trade a token. Your network fees are included in the price that you are quoted and the bundled price you see is the price you get. But let’s start at the beginning.
Basics of gas
If you’re not used to trading in decentralized finance (DeFi), you may not be very familiar with the concept of network fees or “gas”. The TL;DR is that gas fees are payments required as compensation to complete each transaction on a blockchain.
Kind of like how you would pay fees to a bank to wire your money, you need to compensate blockchain miners for computing energy required to process and validate your transaction, and any remainder on top is their profit. Except that this is fully transparent and trustless (in a good way). The gas prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand — e.g. if the network is congested, the fees inevitably go higher.
Each blockchain has its own native asset, used to pay these network fees. These tokens have utility. For example: on Avalanche you pay in AVAX, on Polygon you pay in MATIC, and on Ethereum you pay in ETH. Even the Bitcoin network fees are paid in BTC.
ETHless trades
On Bebop, you don’t need to worry about having a blockchain’s native asset in your wallet to trade. Because Bebop is currently only operating on Ethereum, we highlight that you don’t need to have any ETH in your wallet to trade. These fees are already included in the trade being placed and they won’t change for you once the transaction has been initiated.
We use professional market makers to provide quotes to our users. This means that the quote you receive for your swap will contain both the price for the swap and the amount of gas that the liquidity provider (or “LP”) will charge you for the transaction. Because we hold the wallet that is completing the transaction, you don’t need to have the ETH to support the gas cost. Instead, this fee will be transparently shown to you and deducted from your initial trade — alleviating both the need for ETH and the uncertainty of what the gas will cost.
It’s worth disclosing however that, as on other decentralized exchanges, you are required to approve tokens the first time that you trade them. This approval will need to be paid in ETH and is required one time per token per wallet on the platform.
Join the waitlist!
Try trading on a platform that makes trading in DeFi easy. Join our waitlist at bebop.xyz to get the chance to be one of the first whitelisted users to trade on the platform! Bebop will become available to the greater public during the course of summer 2022.
Stay tuned for announcements and surprises on Twitter and join our Discord to stay connected with the community.
