If you are into blockchain or crypto space for a while, you may have heard of Gas. Gas is the fee required by any transaction to get minted/verified on the blockchain. So what is the fee for?

Gas Fee = amount of tokens that will be burnt for the transaction(the base fee)+ the miner reward

The miner gets a reward for each transaction they verify on the blockchain. This helps the miners to earn some tokens as a reward for their computational power.

On Ethereum, the Gas fee is calculated in GWEI — the smallest unit of ETH. 1 ETH = 10^-9 GWEI.

The below picture sums up the basics of how a transaction and Gasworks 👇

The architecture is not that simple but this is how the flow of transactions is. There can be different use cases for transactions as given below -

• Deploying Smart Contract

• Sending Ethereum to another person

• Interacting with deployed smart contract

• Minting NFT’s

Everything which changes the state on blockchain refers to as a transaction and it will take a Gas Fee for it.

Let’s optimize Gas Fee when doing transactions (from the official docs)

Gas fee can be as high as your wallet balance, just kidding but yes it can 😆

Here I didn't had $221 to deploy my contract 🥲

• Use gas Tracker and do transactions when the gas fee is low

• Attach Gas Limits to transactions to make sure you are in control.

• Use Layer 2 solutions like Polygon or sidechain for scaling with affordable Gas Fees. Many zk-scaling solutions are also available now, you can try them.