A comprehensive understanding of the six major artifacts of Ethereum Gas

Editor's Note: This article comes fromChain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom), Author: Pan Zhixiong, Lianwen Research Director, published with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)

• Chain News ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)

• , Author: Pan Zhixiong, Lianwen Research Director, published with authorization.

As the most important indicator of the ecological activity of the Ethereum network, "Gas price" has always been one of the most concerned data for Ethereum network participants, because it can be used to understand the degree of network congestion, ecological development, or on-chain transactions. degree of urgency.

With the increasing importance of Gas price data, there are more and more third-party tools based on Gas prices, which can be roughly divided into two categories:

Gas Price "History"

"Prediction" of future Gas prices

Among them, the history of Gas prices can assist research institutions to understand what has happened on the chain and the user behavior characteristics of various applications, and the prediction of future Gas prices can provide more accurate data for users, wallets, and applications that need to trade on the chain refer to.

For most users, the need for gas cost prediction should be more common. Many users may not know or directly perceive the existence of such services, because most of them are built into the functions of cryptocurrency wallets, and users can use them directly without special attention. Choosing a suitable service will help the wallet to calculate more accurate values ​​for users, improve user experience, or save costs.

This article will introduce the six most noteworthy third-party data services related to Gas: GasNow, Blockchair, ETH Gas Station, Etherscan, ETH Gas.watch, fees.wtf.

For advanced players, this article will also introduce an advanced usage to quickly get the Gas price.

What is Gas?Let's start with what Gas is.In the Ethereum network, whether it is a transfer transaction or the execution of a smart contract, it needs to consume the computing or storage resources of the entire network. The consumption of these resources is called Gas (gasoline). For each transaction on the chain, two parameters about Gas need to be set, which are the "Maximum Gas Consumption" (Gas Limit) and "Gas Price" (Gas Price) of this transaction. The maximum Gas consumption cost of a transaction (denominated in ETH).

1 ETH = 10^9 Gwei = 10^18 wei

"Gas consumption" depends on the complexity of a single transaction. Some cross-smart contract transactions or very complex transaction logic need to consume more Gas. For the most common transfer transactions, the Gas consumption is 21,000 . The unit of "Gas price" is Gwei, which is completely priced by the market. It can be as high as 500 Gwei during periods of network congestion, and can be as low as below 10 Gwei during bear markets.

Gwei is a unit of measurement for ETH, where wei is the smallest unit of ETH, and wei comes from the name of Dai Wei, a Chinese-American cryptography expert (we have written in "

Biography of Bitcoin Pioneers: Wei Dai

"Introduced in the article), the B-money invented by him is considered to be the spiritual forerunner of Bitcoin. The specific conversion method is:

GasNow: The most real-time and accurate Gas price advice

Several of the services mentioned in this article offer real-time gas price advice, but GasNow is the most recommended of them all.

Interestingly, GasNow has also launched a macOS-based desktop gadget for heavy users. After installation, users can view the gas price that is regularly refreshed in real time in the title bar.

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Highlights: The recommended Gas price launched by the largest mining pool in Ethereum is currently the most worthwhile data for reference.

Applicable scenarios: Most users may not need to use this service directly, because mainstream wallets have built-in GasNow, and they have already enjoyed the more accurate price prediction provided by GasNow. For heavy users, the experience of installing a macOS version will be better.

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For the Ethereum Gas price data, the most noteworthy tool provided by Blockchair is the single-day Ethereum network Gas price median-compared with the single-day Gas price average provided by other companies, the median is more accurate. Reflect the actual operation of the network. For example, there have been many cases in history where users set sky-high Gas Prices. Such extreme outliers will cause the average Gas price to fail to reflect the overall situation of the day. In contrast, the median is immune to these extreme outliers and reflects the true load of the network.

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Blockchair is also an old-fashioned block browser that supports multiple blockchains. It currently supports block data search of 16 public chain networks, and also makes various charts for the data of various public chain projects. They provide a variety and rich data interface (API), which is also one of their profit models.

Highlights: Compared with other companies who use the average value as a reference for historical data, Blockchair uses the median value to effectively exclude outliers in Gas prices.

Applicable scenario: Combine other data or events to refer to the median of Gas on a certain day in history. For example, as of today, the single day with the highest median of Gas in history is the day when Uniswap released the governance token UNI, and the median of Gas prices reached 542. It also means that half of all transactions in the Ethereum network on September 17 had Gas prices exceeding 542 Gwei.

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Before the launch of GasNow, ETH Gas Station has always been the "recommended gas price" source for various wallets or the main reference in the industry. But in addition, the Gas consumption of each application or smart contract counted by ETH Gas Station is also a data worthy of reference and research.

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ETH Gas Station provides a ranking of the gas consumption of a single contract on the chain in the past 30 days on the homepage. Through this list, you can observe some of the most active projects in the past 30 days, as well as the specific gas consumption, the average gas price of a single contract and other data .

Highlights: Gas consumption data accurate to a single smart contract.

Applicable scenarios: Through the Gas consumption list, you can find those emerging or popular smart contracts on the chain.

Etherscan: The most comprehensive Ethereum block data query and graph

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Etherscan is the block explorer with the largest ecological traffic in Ethereum, and it is also the default choice for most Ethereum users and applications. Etherscan provides a variety of block data searches and charts, as well as Gas price recommendations and Gas price average charts similar to GasNow. Etherscan has relatively comprehensive functions, but the professionalism of a single function is not as good as the above services.

Highlights: More comprehensive data and more chart types.

Applicable scenarios: Provides a variety of Ethereum block data and trend charts, suitable for more long-tail needs.

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For users whose transaction needs are not particularly urgent, ETH Gas.watch can help you find the trough of Gas prices and reduce transaction costs on the chain. You can set an email reminder through it, such as sending an email reminder when the Gas price is lower than 50 Gwei, and then perform tasks that are not urgent on-chain interactions.

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ETH Gas.watch is a brand new gadget. In addition to monitoring Gas prices and alerting via email, it also aggregates multiple Gas price prediction services, and multiple data sources can be queried on one website.

Applicable scenarios: For low-frequency and non-urgent transaction needs, you can use ETH Gas.watch to find low-priced opportunities.

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fees.wtf: account gas consumption record query

Users can query the total gas consumed by an Ethereum address through fees.wtf. After using this service, many people find that they have already consumed so much ETH. For example, a certain address of mine consumes more than 1 ETH in Gas cost , the average gas price per transaction is 55 Gwei.

urlsimilar servicesAdvanced usage for advanced players: iOS "shortcut"

Some of the above data services provide external API interfaces, and users who know a little bit of programming or advanced users can use the interfaces to build their own services. Professional users can use Python or other programming languages ​​and servers to build dedicated services, but for ordinary users, some simple tools can actually improve efficiency, especially for heavy users.