Entering the Monolith: the Gas Tank explained
The Monolith experience runs on the Ethereum blockchain. If we are the portal to a new paradigm, Ethereum is the universe we are helping our users access. There are a few things to understand about Ethereum before getting started on the journey to transcendence. One of them is how transactions are processed. Ethereum is a smart contract platform — every transaction is executed using a contract that’s been deployed to the network. These transactions require gas. This guide explains everything you need to know about gas, and how it relates to Monolith.
Key takeaways:
- Every transaction on the Ethereum network requires paying a small amount of ETH, known as gas.
- As Monolith is built on Ethereum, the wallet features a Gas Tank. It needs to be filled to use the network.
- We recommend making larger transactions rather than multiple smaller ones to avoid excessive gas fees.
What is gas?
Gas is the fuel that powers Ethereum’s smart contracts. It’s required for every transaction on the network.
Gas explained
Gas is the measure of the amount of computational power needed to execute a transaction. Every Ethereum transaction requires computational resources, which is why there’s a fee for each transaction.
Gas fees vary depending on the type of transaction; more complex operations require more power, so the transaction is more expensive. Sending ETH to another address, for example, costs less gas than entering a liquidity pool on a decentralised exchange like Balancer.
Gas prices
Gas prices also vary depending on how many people are using the network. At periods of high activity, prices often surge. That’s why we notify our users in the Monolith app when the network starts to get congested.
Gas is denominated in Gwei, which is a small denomination of ETH. 1 Gwei is equal to 0.000000001 ETH.
The Gas Limit denotes the amount of Gas used for the transaction. It’s set to a minimum of 21,000.
The Gas Price denotes the amount of Gwei spent on the transaction. Gas prices often range from 10 Gwei up to 200 Gwei, though they can go higher: during the yield farming and CryptoKitties crazes, it went as high as 500 Gwei.
When a transaction is set to 50 Gwei, for example, the cost of the transaction would be:
21,000 x 50 Gwei = 0.00105 ETH
As a helpful comparison, gas fees on Ethereum work similarly to petrol in cars: the price is set per gallon, and the amount paid depends on how many units are used to fill the car.
Several tools provide live price feeds on gas prices to help users estimate the cost of fulfilling a transaction. We recommend ETH Gas Station.
Monolith uses ETH Gas Station to calculate gas fees — our transactions are priced according to the “fast” option.
The Gas Tank
The Monolith wallet incorporates a Gas Tank. It’s the place you store ETH to pay for transactions.
The Gas Tank needs to contain enough ETH to cover your transaction; if it’s empty, you won’t be able to use the network.
The Monolith app is linked to two addresses: the Contract Wallet address, and the Owner Address. The Gas Tank represents the Owner Address. You can find the address by hitting ‘Diagnostics’ under the ‘Support’ menu on the ‘Settings’ tab.
Filling the tank
The Gas Tank can be filled by adding ETH to your wallet. There are a couple of ways to do this: you can send ETH to your wallet from a separate address, or if you already have some gas you may choose to use the integrated swap feature to exchange DAI, the base token of the Monolith wallet, for ETH.
Once you have some ETH, the Gas Tank can be topped up by hitting the fuel gauge icon underneath your Contract Wallet balance on the ‘Wallet’ tab.
The app makes a suggestion of how much gas you should top up to make a minimum amount of transactions.
As you need gas for every transaction on the network, we’d recommend topping up the tank with enough ETH to last some time. It’s best to avoid emptying the tank dry, too.
Emptying the tank
It’s possible to transfer ETH from the tank by importing the Owner Address to an external wallet such as Metamask. Because the Gas Tank has its own address, you can move the funds by simply connecting to the address and executing a transaction to send them elsewhere. For more information, head to our guide on importing your Monolith wallet here.
Daily limits
Our smart contract wallet also includes a Daily Gas Tank Limit. Setting a limit can be a useful safety precaution against sending too many transactions, particularly if you someone gets access to your wallet. The limit is automatically set to 0.5 ETH, though it can be amended by hitting ‘Security’ followed by ‘Daily Gas Tank Limit’ on the ‘Wallet’ tab.
Final word
We hope that this guide details everything you need to know about using gas to fulfil Ethereum transactions with Monolith. We know that gas prices can sometimes be expensive, however we do our best to alleviate this by highlighting when the network is congested. To avoid paying excessively for gas, we’d recommend planning for transactions such as top-ups by sending a bigger amount. That way, you only pay for one transaction rather than several smaller ones. You can also wait until gas prices are low before commiting to a transaction. It’s all part of the learning process of discovering a new decentralised economy.
