Automate — Gas Price vs. Confirmation Time
Ethereum is likely the most secure option for Dapps to run on because it has the largest decentralized network capable of handling smart contracts. Dapps powered by Ethereum can do anything from minting NFTs to providing automated liquidity pools.
With demand for Ethereum hitting new highs, Ethereum gas prices have become distressing. Spending all that GWEI every day can dig into your profits and be a headache for any crypto person actively using the network. Minting an NFT, for example, can cost upwards of $100, making them inaccessible for a lot of low-budget artists right now. The same goes for gaming and other low-volume financial applications that could see huge benefits from the blockchain as soon as it becomes more affordable.
If you’re looking to save money on your Ethereum transactions, you really need to consider optimizing your transaction timing. Generally speaking, gas prices are usually lower on Saturdays and Sundays, so one easy thing to do is to start batching your transactions on the weekends. On the other hand, the worst times are on workdays, where the network is at its busiest and the gas prices are at their highest.
Ethereum gas costs can also be up to 50% cheaper at a certain time of day. And the reason for that is because people in the US are asleep during that time, Europe is just about to start their day, while Asia is finishing up their work. To visualize that, let’s take a view of the historical gas price per transaction over one day:
You can clearly see the spikes of high network activity and can keep an eye out for a period with low activity to make your next move. Transact during these «quiet hours» and your gas expenses have a good chance of being lower than they would be otherwise!
But despite all these compelling suggestions, constantly monitoring the network activity and analyzing the charts doesn’t seem like a perfect solution to the problem. It would be better if there was an automated way to hold off a bit on your transactions and set the optimal amount of fees automatically based on the historical gas price data. Done instantly, without you ever wondering when the next period of low network activity will be.
The good news? ChronoLogic has released a new version of Automate capable of doing exactly that. It analyzes historical gas prices in real time and proposes the best gas price for you based on the amount of time you are ready to wait until your transaction gets confirmed. As you might have guessed, the longer you wait, the cheaper gas prices you may acquire. Here is a sneak peek of what your settings might look like in Automate if you were planning to get your transactions confirmed within 24 hours.
You can get an idea of how our algorithm works by finding the minimum and average gas prices in a given time period and then calculating the average of these two values. It’s worth mentioning that in our calculations we don’t use the absolute minimum of the gas price to increase the chance that transactions get executed during the time of increased network congestion.
DISCLAIMER: Since we cannot control the Ethereum network, this is NOT a guaranteed confirmation time. For most users, 24 hours seems to be a reasonable time to wait. But if during this time slot gas price doesn’t drop below the price you’re willing to pay, then a transaction doesn’t get sent.
Hopefully, high gas prices aren’t a permanent concern. With the arrival of L2 scaling solutions and Ethereum 2.0, these prices will come down considerably. Yet we do have to deal with these prices for now. So the next time you have to perform a transaction, don’t just go mindlessly do it. Use Automate and you can save yourself a lot of ETH. Take a look at the analysis of potential savings that we conducted internally at ChronoLogic.
If you haven’t been following our recent developments in this area, we highly recommend you to read our previous articles on how to use Automate in DeFi, how to automate your NFT purchases, and how to cut your gas costs on XFai.
