ETH Gas Prices ⛽ Info & Resources

Table of contents

1. What Is Gas?
2. List of Gas Trackers
3. Why Gas Prices are High?
4. Layer 2 and which ones should you try?
5. Are other chains as good as they claim?

What Is Gas?

Ethereum is the network (aka blockchain network), Ether is the Engine or supplier for that network.
when you do anything on the Ethereum blockchain, you must pay for that payment is calculated in gas which is paid in ETH.

It does not matter whether your transaction succeeded or failed. Even if you fail, miners must validate and execute your transaction and you are required to pay gas fee.

open Etherscan.io and use can see transaction fee in ETH & USD.
fee is paid to miners for mining transactions, putting them into blocks, and securing the blockchain.
gas limit: total cost of a transaction multiplied by the gas price and it's the maximum amount of units of gas you are willing to spend on a transaction
gas limit like the amount of liters of gas for a car
gas price as the cost of that liter of gas
Gwei is just a unit of Ether it is equal to 0.000000001 ETH

If you want to spend less on a transaction, you can do so by lowering the amount you pay per unit of gas.

List of Gas Trackers

https://ethgas.watch/: an aggregated gas price feed that checks multiple data sources for the latest gas prices
https://etherscan.io/gastracker: Gas Guzzlers, Gas Spenders, Historical Gas Oracle Prices
https://www.gasnow.org/: ETH gas price forecast system
https://ethgasstation.info/index.php: Ethereum gas estimator

Why Gas Prices are High?

Ethereum is getting more and more popular, more projects use Ethereum blockchain in NFTs, DeFi, Mainnet.
Gas prices are subject to their own markets of supply and demand
more people send transactions, gas prices will increase to reflect that
Average Gas Limit Chart shows the historical increasing gas limit of the Ethereum network. https://etherscan.io/chart/gaslimit

What are L2s and which ones should you try?

they all offload some of the demand from mainnet Ethereum while maintaining some or most of the security guarantees.

Remember, even though these protocols are promising, they are still early versions. Use with your own risk

list of L2s that are live now or soon that you can try out

ZkRollups:
- https://loopring.org/#/: Exchange and Payment Protocol
- https://zksync.io/: scaling and privacy engine for Ethereum
Optimistic Rollups:
- https://optimism.io/: (live in March) - Instant transactions and scalable smart contracts
- https://www.xdaichain.com/: a stable payments blockchain designed for fast and inexpensive stable transactions

Are other chains as good as they claim?

"come to ____ chain, we've got low / no fees!!" no fees is always true:

They cut corners on decentralization - most frequently by increasing the hardware or bandwidth requirements for nodes.
They are hiding the true costs - like requiring users to stake funds to send transactions
They will eventually run into the same issues as Ethereum - more users will inevitably lead to more congestion.

Sources

Code:

https://support.mycrypto.com/general-knowledge/ethereum-blockchain/what-is-gas#:~:text=When%20you%20send%20tokens%2C%20interact,your%20transaction%20succeeds%20or%20fails.
https://ethgas.watch/
https://etherscan.io/gastracker
https://www.gasnow.org/
https://ethgasstation.info/index.php
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/lt8xgw/high_gas_prices_info_resources/