Over the weekend, Yuga Labs released virtual plots of land in their highly anticipated metaverse, Otherside, heavily disrupting the Ethereum blockchain.
A total of 55,000 “Otherdeeds” sold at a price of 305 ApeCoin, or around $5,800 at the time of purchase; making Otherside the largest NFT mint in history. But, because Otherdeeds were minted on the Ethereum blockchain, the sudden increase in demand caused a “gas war” (i.e. skyrocketing transaction fees).
(NOTE: Gas is the amount of crypto that's paid to nodes on the blockchain to process a transaction.)
This meant that those purchasing Otherdeeds paid anywhere from $3,000 to $14,000 in gas alone - regardless of whether or not their transaction went through - with prices up to 200x more than normal. By the time the virtual land deeds sold out, buyers paid a total of about $123 million just to execute their transactions.
Typical gas fees are nowhere near this high, but given the wild gas spike caused by the Otherside mint, now seems like an appropriate time to talk about gas - specifically, how to pay less of it.
The trade-off to paying less gas on Ethereum is longer transaction times (i.e. loss of convenience). If you’re good with that, here are 3 ways to pay less gas:
Cancel the transaction and/or wait for lower prices
You can cancel a pending transaction if you change your mind or want to wait for lower gas fees. It’s fairly simple to cancel a pending transaction in Metamask, simply select “Cancel” next to the transaction. Keep in mind that a cancellation can only be attempted if the transaction is still pending on the network. Transactions that have already been confirmed cannot be reversed.
However, if this doesn’t work, you can cancel the transaction by sending a new transaction with the same nonce. Metamask provides instruction on how to do this at the bottom of this page.
If you opt to wait for lower gas prices the lowest fees are usually seen on the weekends between 9 PM and 1 AM PST when America is getting ready for bed and Europe is just waking up. (This obviously was not the case this past weekend with the Otherside launch, but this was an outlier.)
You can visit Etherscan’s gas tracker to check current and historical gas prices.
Use an L2 chain like Polygon or Optimism
Ethereum is not the only blockchain with gas fees, it’s just the most expensive, at least until “The Merge” is complete. So, until that time, try experimenting with Layer 2 chains that offer faster and cheaper transactions than Ethereum L1.
This guide can help you get started with Polygon.
Set a max gas fee
On Metamask, you can set your gas fee to “Low” before confirming a transaction. If you want to save even more gas, click on “Advanced Options”. Here, you can set the max fee to slightly above the 7 day lowest historical gas price according to Etherscan. Setting a low max gas fee means that your transaction might take a full day to process, but it won’t cost you as much.
Interested in learning about how to set your own gas prices? We recommend this article.