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I have some basic undestanding of how ethereum works but I'm not sure about transaction fees on stablecoins like Tether and other tokens running on ethereum.

So on ethereum when your sending tether your sending tether including the ethereum gas fee.

So my question might be a bit newbish but do you need besides tether in your wallet also ether for paying gas, or in other words you need two?

Im not aware of how token representation with ether etc works, and I also don't intent to learn more about ethereum but it was an question which got my attention.

Yes, you need to prepare some amount of ETH to pay the fees in your transaction. Basically it's not only applied for Tether or stablecoins but for all kind of tokens that running on ethereum blockchain, you can use ETH Gas Station (https://ethgasstation.info/) to track the current gas prices on the network.

When sending tether or usdt or any other stablecoin running on the Ethereum blockchain, you need just ether to pay for fees, this is to say that the fees you pay for the transaction will only be taken from your Ethereum balance and not Ethereum and usdt together, it is like for other tokens also running on Ethereum blockchain but you must understand that the amount of fees token for different contracts varries due to code differences, some codes are written with different functions and the more the functions in a code, the more fees that contract is likely to consume.

That's right, you'll always need to pay the gas fee using the ETH in your address otherwise you can't send your tokens. It's always bogging my mind as well when using smart contract crypto more specifically when trying to send some tokens since it's really inconvenient but then again if they want to make it automatically deduct equal amount of ETH from the token just for the sake of simplicity and convenience then they need to create some kind of swap platform for this.
But, FYI sending token usually requires higher eth gas fee compared to sending just ETH.

Basically you are right. All erc 20 tokens are present in Ethereum and you need eth to pay as gas whenever you want to transfer erc 20 tokens between wallets.

Hint: Use Trc 20 for USDT

Ethereum is a blockchain that helps you create your own tokens but you need to pay for transaction using Ether, all theses ERC20 tokens on Ethereum you will need to pay to transact with them using Ethereum. If you want to pay with your native coin then you will need your own blockchain

Thank you all for your answers.

It answered my question and also showed my now that running stablecoins or altcoin tokens on an blockchain like ethereum is not good for an average consumer.

Having and maniging two coins for one is not very user friendly.

For people like us who do research daily in this kind of topics and are in general well aware how those things work its easy.

But not for an average consumer and with that its not ready for mass adoption. Among many other more significant reasons which are present in the whole digital currency eco system today.

Im also not surprised that basicly the whole volume and usage of Tether is for speculants and traders.

Which I'm not saying is bad but it would be nice to see it also useable for everyone.

But other and better solutions are on their way.

Even though your tokens will reach millions of dollars in your wallet, you will need some ETH to pay for the gas or what we called transaction fees. This is how the Ethereum network works. But don't worry, you don't need the same amount of ETH to the same amount of tokens you have. You just need to pay the current gas fees which you can check here: https://ethgasstation.info/


As of now, the price to get the fastest transaction is quite high but compared to a few days ago, this one is good.

Tether available on different chains, for example if you have ethereum based USDT and wanted to make a transaction then you need to have USDT as well as ethereum because the native currency can be only used as gas fee which applies to TRON as well as BTC based USDT.

You need both coins in your wallet. tether is just ethereum asset and the ethereum network will be only accepting ethereum to paid the gas fees to send your transaction. When you are sending any ethereum asset and you will always need the gas fees dude. That's a must and you can't use ethereum network without paying fees in ethereum. that's why there must be ethereum in your walelt.

USDT is based on the ethereum blockchain, If you want to send it you must have ethereum in your wallet. ethereum is used for gas fees, to compensate for the computational energy required to process and validate transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.

You can customize gas price and gas limit for your transaction (ETH or ERC-20 tokens) and you can cancel or replace your transactions too.

ETH/ERC20 - Check and select good Gas price (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5261480.msg54771880#msg54771880)
GAS NOW - New Price Gas Forecast Service (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5278723.0)
[GAS Price Aggregator] How to find the optimal gas price (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5275510.0)
Paying low fees in Ethereum - Gas Limit, Gas Price and Gwei (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3285767.msg34270190#msg34270190)
[GUIDE] How to cancel or replace an ETH transaction (Metamask, MEW, MyCrypto) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5277890.0)

There is never a situation ETH network that whenever you send Tether you also pay Tether for gas fees. It doesn't work that way.

The gas fees are forcing traders to just let their coins stay on exchanges that on their ETH wallet. Unless you are that rich to do most of your trades on Uniswap which every transaction is a lot more expensive than just sending a token.

Yes mate If you are using the ERC20 USDT you need to pay Ether in your transaction as a gas fee and thats quite expensive today, But the good news is  USDT is not only running using Ethereum Blockchain, It can be used also in TRON as TRC20 USDT which is cheaper in terms of transaction fees compared to Ethereum thats why it's better to choose wisely to save your ether.

Every single asset on ethereum need eth if you want to send them. It is for paying gas fees, even you want to send usdt you still need ethereum to send it for gas, and eyhereum gas fees is so high compare to BNB and other blockchain.

USDT has been integrated to a few blockchains: OMNI layer on bitcoin blockchain, ERC-20 on ETH blockchain, TRC-20 on TRX blockchain, EOS, etc.

With the high transaction fees on Bitcoin and Ethereum network, people are keen on using TRC-20 chain to move their Tether USD if possible. If they are moving USDT from exchange A to exchange B, two exchanges must support TRC-20 for Tether USD. Send USDT cross-chain without supports from exchanges will cause loss of USDT you send away.

If you do that mistake, you must contact support and need luck to get your USDT back. You also need to pay fee from exchange if they accept to retrieve your USDT for you.

You will always need ethereum and whatever kind of coin that will be sending it from your wallet to the another ethereum address and you will always need ethereum to pay the transaction fees.
That's the main requirement to use ethereum network.

yes as with the future terms of entrance, the network fee might be lower than as now with average 7 - 13 dollar per transaction. those gives chance they said for ethereum miners with work on mining but makes difficulty on trader to deliver funds on balance with the higher fee since several months ago.

As far as I can tell, you will always need ether in your wallet to pay for transaction fee when transferring the tokens in the future. I'm not sure if it's possible to pay for transaction fee with anything else besides ether.

It's just plain that you have to pay for the gas fees for you to transact and send any tokens that are running through Ethereum's network. There's not that much of technicalities on it. But if you think that it's not for average person, you're right. People have to learn about gas fees and networks about their tokens.

The problem today isn't what you're saying about owning two coins at the same time. What most of the people in the crypto space are problematic about the high fees in Ethereum/gas.

Yes, as long as the Tether(USDT) is an ERC20 token , it will require a eth in your wallet to cover for the transaction fees, and it's not just Tether(USDT) this is applicable to all ERC20 tokens, or all tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain, i just hope you are aware of the high cost of transaction fees on the Ethereum blockchain, if you can afford paying $25+ per transaction then you are good, but if you can't its best you stay away from eth and ERC20 tokens from now becuz of the transaction fees.

Its a nice guess. Ethereum based tokens just provides himself interest. Guys look to the value of transaction cost into the Ethereum net and compare them with other tokens.

I also experienced that in my Exodus wallet way back I thought my small Ehereum can still cover my gas, but it was not and I have to wait sometime before I can add Ethereum to my Exodus because the transaction at that time was on an all-time high, just sending it in my Exodus will eat a lot of fees, so if you are going to store USDT on eth platform be sure you have enough gas, I prefer USDT on Tron better with their low fees, I'm not a big fan of Stable coin, there's no profit holding but just part of the strategy to keep your portfolio safe.

I remember finding 40 as "a lot" and right now it is about 150 for sending under 2 minutes. That is really not normal right now, the link you sent me also shows the minimum as what it should be but you could always try to go lower and lower. I have sent with 20% less than what the "minimum suggested" before and it still passed, took some time but it still passed, I know people hate waiting for hours until your money comes but as long as it doesn't get rejected you could do it.

So, what I do is go for like half of what is suggested which gets rejected 100% of the time, and then I go 1 higher and 1 higher until it doesn't get rejected and eventually reach to a decent level. Of course this was back when ethereum transaction fee was like 4 dollars or so, and not what we are anywhere near those levels anymore since ETH price went up while ETH cost of fee went up together and made it even higher.

and now expensive gas will make transaction fees even more expensive too, of course if you want to send tokens from the ethereum platform, you must have an ethereum balance of at least $ 50 for transaction fees, it's terrible isn't it, that's why Binance is now a competitor of Ethereum and trying to shift ethereum's position in 2nd place.

When you are not doing swap and then you didn't need a lot of fees to create a single ERC20 transaction. As far as i know the tokens fees should be around $20 and that might be less consider the gas is quite stable at this moment. it looks like OP was a newcomer and that's why he was asking about this too.
When you are using good wallet and the gas fee will always be calculated anytime based on the data that being send by the node that has been running by the wallet provider.

Ethereum transaction fees are expensive because ethereum prices have gone up very high, now BNB prices are still cheap, but if BNB is already expensive, transaction fees on the BSC network will also be very expensive, because I see that once transactions on the BNB network require at least 0.004 BNB and that is not much different from transaction fees at ETH

That's the factor to consider, way back ETH is not as high as what itis now. You can't just
simply send your assets to other wallet or exchange without paying the gas fee and it's really
high now. if you don't have that much tokens you are trapped, who will transfer asset with
more fees than what you will get.

yeah current ethereum tps is just too slow, i wonder whether the developers back then didn't anticipate their coin to have this much of a traffic, eth 2.0 is still a long way to go too since there's rumour that the miners didn't really agree with eth switching to pos and the sharding aswell since it could be potential profit loss for them, this is getting really ridiculous and out of hand.

What do you mean about himself interest? Ethereum is native coin and it has less gas fees compared with the ethereum asset. People will always need ethereum to interact with the blockchain and this is already fully programmed.
The miners are only receiving ethereum and it doesn't make sense to bring back to comparison between ethereum with another platform.
I guess OP has got his answer and he might sent more ethereum to send his USDT or token