How does any.sender deal with network congestion?
Editor's Note: This article comes fromEthereum enthusiasts (ID: ethfans)Editor's Note: This article comes from
Ethereum enthusiasts (ID: ethfans)
Ethereum enthusiasts (ID: ethfans)
, Author: Patrick McCorry, translation: A Jian, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
- The transaction fee peak of ICO in 2017 is nothing compared to the past few weeks -
any.sender is a non-custodial high throughput transaction relayer. Our goal is to allow your transaction to be packaged as soon as possible while optimizing the payment fee, even when the network is extremely crazy and congested. So how do we do it?
Users pay 4.8 times more fees on Ethereum than on Bitcoin
The decadent petty traders and speculative atmosphere that filled the 2017 bull market are back in full force. But this time, thanks to the rise of the DeFi world, these activities bypassed centralized exchanges, and many of these activities took place directly on Ethereum.
These activities are so hot that Ethereum block producers have harvested more than $6.8 million in fees in just 36 hours of YAM’s liquidity mining boom. At that time, if a transaction was to be packaged on the chain quickly, the Gas price had to be arranged between 200 and 330 Gwei.
Let’s take a look at the amount of Gas consumed by various operations:
A normal transfer of ETH consumes 21,000 Gas, which is about $2.45 (about 0.0063 ETH)
Uniswap transactions need to consume 100,000 Gas, or about $11.64 (about 0.03 ETH)
Deploying a Gnosis secure wallet requires 250,000 Gas, which is about $29.20 (about 0.075 ETH)
The Gas consumption that can be accommodated in the entire block is 12 million, about 1401 USD (about 3.6 ETH)
Although YAM eventually failed due to a bug in the smart contract, its impact on the entire fee market is still shockingly large.
So can any.sender help reduce transaction fees?
There are two ways to avoid paying high processing fees:
Use the Layer-2 scheme. For example, send your transaction through the rollup side chain;
Use a smarter fee strategy. It is to send the transaction at the lowest fee rate, and then strategically increase the rate until the transaction is finally packaged.
Although there are already a number of really interesting Layer-2 solutions under development, none of them can support you to play DeFi yet. Therefore, the only way to go is a smarter fee strategy, which is what our any.sender is targeting.
What does our strategy look like? We send transactions at a fee rate that is lower than the fast chain-up level. Every time the network digs a new block, we re-evaluate all transactions in the queue, and then increase the fee rate according to a predefined fee strategy. any.sender republishes a transaction after its fee estimate has increased by about 13%.
Therefore, our fee-increasing strategy is very simple, but it can optimally find the lowest network fee while ensuring that the on-chain time is within 1 to 3 minutes.
The Birth and Death of YAM
Summary: The transaction Gas price of any.sender is 56-77 Gwei lower than that of a popular exchange and a popular wallet relayer on average, and 19 Gwei lower than the price estimated by popular websites for fast chaining. All transactions are on-chain within 6-7 minutes (mostly within 5 minutes), and the part that saves the most transaction fees is also the fastest on-chain.
methodology. any.sender sends a new transaction every 3 hours using the above method. We track transactions sent from a popular wallet relayer and a popular exchange, and select these based on when they were on-chain. Finally, we get the "estimated fast on-chain gas price" from the etherchain block explorer (similar to the statistics provided by the popular ethgasstation website).
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- Figure 1. The situation of 23 transactions in two days from birth to death of YAM -
Figure 1 shows the gas price paid for transactions from any.sender, popular wallet relayers, and transactions on popular exchanges. There is also an estimated fast chain price.
It can be seen that the floating range of the handling fee is quite large, ranging from 116 Gwei (any.sender) to 432 Gwei (popular exchanges). It is estimated that the price of Gas that can be quickly uploaded to the chain will fluctuate greatly. Therefore, the two-day situation of YAM from birth to death is exactly a model for the highly fluctuating handling fees that relayers must deal with in real time. After all, there is never peace on the Ethereum network...
Let's review the timeline:
It was a moment of ecstasy, as farmers frantically planted sweet potatoes, dispatched tractors to fertilize them, and eventually sold them before the one-hit counterfeiter sweet potato killers arrived. (Translator's Note: The recently emerging "liquidity mining" (providing liquidity to obtain protocol-native tokens) has an alias called "Yield Farming", which literally translates to "farming return rate", and YAM tokens The logo is a sweet potato, hence the playful description.)
During this period, 4 of the 9 transactions sent by any.sender had gas prices lower than the "estimated gas price that can be quickly uploaded", and only 1 transaction was higher than the price given by popular wallets. Considering that miners have collected more than $6 million in fees during this period (the activity on the blockchain is extremely active), it is an impressive achievement that any.sender can still pay less than the estimated price to get on-chain quickly up.
11 am on August 13, 2020 ~ 2 am on August 14, 2020: YAM ends
- We miss you, YAM -
During this period, 5 out of 7 transactions sent by any.sender were below the estimated fast on-chain price. Gas Prices for all transactions are lower than (measured) prices given by popular exchanges and popular wallets.
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- We caught the time when CURVE was launched... and it only took a day's work... -
4 out of 6 transactions sent by any.sender were below etherchain's estimated fast on-chain price, and each cost less than the top exchanges and wallets we measured.
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- Figure 2. Relative savings (parts above 0) and relative consumption (parts below 0) of any.sender -
Figure 2 shows that any.sender only generates higher consumption in a few cases, and in most scenarios it is lower than the estimated fast on-chain price.
Comparing exchanges, the exchange paid an additional price ranging from 23 Gwei to 227 Gwei. The Gas Price of any.sender saves an average of 77 Gwei compared to the exchange.
Comparing wallets, the wallet's overpayments range from -13.81 (only once lower than our transaction) to 152 Gwei. The Gas Price of any.sender saves an average of 56.9 Gwei compared to this wallet.
Comparing the website, several times, the website’s estimated fast chaining is lower than the price we actually paid. Overall, the difference between the price we paid and the price we paid ranged from -17.25 Gwei to 79.03 Gwei. The average savings for any.sender is 19 Gwei.
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- Figure 3. Our goal is to allow transactions to be on the chain within 3 minutes, but it was a bit difficult in the two days when YAM exploded -
We have fine-tuned the target to be on-chain in 2~3 minutes, because this is a reasonable goal when using most applications, and it also gives us enough time to capture the lowest Gas Price.
And, while some transactions took slightly longer to on-chain than we expected, none of them got stuck.
The data we harvested in the past two days can also feed back our design. So the next time there is YAM, we will also be ready for the ultimate sprint.
Why does any.sender have the smallest savings compared to the estimated fast-link price? At a time when fees are historically high, being able to successfully get on-chain at a price below the estimated price is already unbelievable. We believe that our relatively small savings, assuming reliable estimates of the fast-scaling gas price, are due to our pumping strategy that would push the price just above the fast-scaling price.
Why can only any.sender send transactions lower than the fast on-chain price? Because the current strategy of other relayers seems to be to roughly set a fixed fee rate, and then periodically adjust the fixed fee rate in response to the fluctuation of the handling fee. Most services are happy to pay a higher gas price because one transaction gets stuck causing their entire queue to be blocked, and relayer software usually doesn't handle this well.
But who is paying these excess fees? Ultimately it's you, you, the users themselves, and sometimes you pay a lot more.
We developed any.sender to save money
We discovered last year that sending transactions on Ethereum at a reliable and affordable price is nothing less than a technical challenge.
No team has really solved this problem. Instead, most relayers read the data from the ethgasstation website, add 50 Gwei to the estimated fast on-chain price on the website, and send out the transaction. If the fees on the network happen to be skyrocketing during that time, your transaction is stuck. To make matters worse, if you use a third-party relayer, the gas consumption of the transaction will increase by 200,000!
Our any.sender goal is very simple:
