Why is my Transaction so slow? Understanding Gas
To perform any action on a blockchain, you must perform a transaction or some kind of activity on the chain. That action could be swapping tokens, transferring tokens between wallets, or trading tokens on a centralized exchange. Each of these transactions has a cost that if not paid enough, can have a major impact on your blockchain activity.
If you don’t pay enough fees to those providing the network, your transactions could potentially get ‘stuck’ for minutes or even days. How do you prevent this situation? Learn how gas works and how much to give!
How to Pay Fees: Gas
The unit of measurement for fees to pay for a transaction on any blockchain is called gas. Gas is a number that measures the amount of computational effort required to perform specific actions on a blockchain. Similar to fueling up your car with gasoline, gas on blockchain fuels transactions.
Every transaction performed on a blockchain requires gas with varying degrees of cost depending on the complexity of the task. Smart contracts, for example, are more expensive than a simple transfer due to the multiple operations a contract may perform.
The amount of gas you provide for a transaction dictates your place in line. If, for example, you provided a lot less gas for a transaction than someone who provided more at the exact same time, the blockchain would process the other person’s transactions a lot faster.
Not Gallons but GWEI
Gasoline for a car is measured in liters or gallons. The same goes for gas on a blockchain. In that case, instead of gallons, gas is measured in GWEI or 0.000000001 MATIC (if on the Polygon blockchain). 1 GWEI equals 0.000000001 MATIC.
As an example, let’s say you want to send a simple transaction on Polygon and the price of MATIC at the time is $1. Dividing the dollar value by 1,000,000,000 gives you a price of 0.000000001 MATIC.
More Gas Equals Faster Transactions
Before signing every transaction, you need to set up how much gas fee you are willing to pay for it in your wallet. By default, your wallet recommends a fee that is usually not the best one you may get.
How do we change that? To gauge how much gas you should provide, go to sites like the Polygon Gas Tracker or gas.ngmi.ventures/polygon. These sites provide you with an estimation from Standard, Fast and Rapid on how fast you can expect a transaction to happen based on the amount of gas you provide.
Remember, more gas means a faster transaction!
Conclusion
After the examples mentioned in this post, we can realize that it is not only easy and practical to change the transaction fees according to our needs, but that it is also much cheaper to perform these transactions on the Polygon Network than on the Ethereum Network.
The Polygon Network is one of the most affordable networks in terms of transactions on the market, and we at KogeFarm are extremely happy to be present on it.
If you find transactions are sticking for you or are very slow, try to increase your gas! If you continue to run into issues, please stop by the KogeFarm Telegram or Discord communities, where you’ll always find someone willing to help you out.
