Raging Gas Fees

The Importance of Gas

The word Gas is used to refer to many things, from natural gas, to gasoline, to the air we breathe and even the fees on the Ethereum blockchain. This commodity touches nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s being used every day for electricity, manufacturing, transportation and products. However, the cost to procure this commodity is gradually becoming more and more expensive.

Regular gasoline for example, has increased over 40.8% (per gallon) since January 2021 where prices were $2.259 to November 2021 where prices are now approximately $3.18. Natural gas has seen 103% increase (per Million Btu) from $2.71 in January 2021 to $5.51 in October 2021.

Ethereum and Smart Contract

As most crypto enthusiast already know, one of Ethereum’s main use case is to allow smart contracts to be built on the Ethereum blockchain. Click the link for an intro to Ethereum . Smart contracts are basically simple computer programs that facilitates the exchange of any valuable asset between two parties. Smart contracts could be shares, property, money or any other digital assets, like QBUX and Intercoin that you want to exchange.

Ethereum’s Gas Fee

The word Gas is used to refer to the fee or the pricing value required to successfully execute a contract or conduct a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. This price is set by the Miners as a rewards mechanism to process a transaction faster and is denoted in Gwei, which itself is a denomination of ETH. Gwei means giga-wei which was named after Wei-Dai, a computer engineer known for his contributions to cryptography and cryptocurrencies. A single gwei is equal to 0.000000001 ETH (10-9 ETH). For example, instead of saying that your gas costs 0.000000001 ether, you can say your gas costs 1 gwei.

The gas market price is determined by the demand for resources on the network. The amount of gas you need depends on how large of a transaction you are trying to execute and how fast you want it executed. The longer you wait, the less you pay and vice versa. This is explained further in the video below. In Feb 2021, the gas price went as high as 376.8 Gwei according to YCharts .

Ethereum Gas Limit

Users can set a gas limit per transaction. This indicates how much gas fee they are willing to spend on that particular transaction. Any gas that was not used during the transaction is returned to the user. The gas limit is also used as a means to safeguard against bad actors wanting to spam the network. This will prevent any accidental or hostile infinite loops or other waste of computational resources due to unoptimized code.

Ethereum Gas tracker

The price of Ethereum’s gas fluctuates on a regular bases. If you rather to pay less for a transaction on the ethereum blockchain, you can track the price by following:


Great Article. I love how you broke down the Ethereum gas and how it works. So not only do we have high blockchain gas fees Ethereum we are at almost $5 a gallon for premium here in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s terrible. ETH 2.0 may solve some issues but as far as gas prices in real life especially around the holidays I don’t see them lowering anytime soon. All we can do is hope.


Great read, enjoyed that!

Though I gotta say I’m not having Americans moaning about gas prices :rofl:

$5 a gallon you say!! Here we pay £1.48 ($2) a litre - 4.5ltrs in a gallon so we’re paying double, and that’s just normal prices there’s been no hike :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes::joy:


It seems this will only get worse. The current administration is considering shutting down the Michigan pipeline, probably a part of the climate change agenda, so if the supply reduces and demand remains the same or increases, I reckon that the price of gas will increase as well.


Wow that’s crazy carts! I never knew that! I need an electric car for sure especially the way things are headed.

Wow that is nuts! I feel as though everything has been getting worse lately. That would definitely rise prices to new ATH’s. Oh boy……

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There are a lot of electric cars here now, there are charging ports across the city which are all free to use.

I’m really into my cars, gonna miss the noise (and smell) of cars when they are gone :sob:


I know exactly what you mean. I may get a hybrid soon and use it until the government forbids the use of gas operating vehicles.