metamask – How Does Metamask Calculate Its Suggested Gas Fees?

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How does metamask come up its suggested gas fees? How does it come up with a certain amount?

What is it optimised for? Should you just use it or should you set your own?

Best Answer

It uses web3.eth.estimateGas (https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/v1.2.11/web3-eth.html), which basically runs the transaction locally and returns the amount of gas used. It's pretty good most of the times but it can definitely get it wrong. Not sure in which specific cases though.

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transactions – How to Minimize Fees for Sending $20 Worth of USDC

How can I minimize the gas fees when using metamask?

It is possible to set custom gas fees when sending a transaction with Metamask (see here : https://metamask.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015488771-How-to-Adjust-Gas-Price-and-Gas-Limit-). The Ethereum network is currently overloaded and the consequence is a higher gas cost. You can see the average gas price here : https://ethgasstation.info/.

And is it true that if I set the gas fee too low, I would lose my ETH on a failed USDC transaction?

No, your transaction, in the worst case, will not be mined and get stucked. In this situation you have to send a new transaction with the same nonce and a significantly higher gas price (or just wait). Metamask does it for you with the "Speed Up" option. Note that you can't lose funds involved in a failed transaction as the transaction will be reverted by the network. However you will lose the gas paid to process the transaction.

How come nothing was revamped to foresee a potential gas fee issue all these years on layer 1? What solutions are there for layer 1?

Gas fees are a real challenge and some solutions are under reviewed for the Ethereum 1.0 chain. One of them is the EIP-1559. This EIP has the objective to change the transaction pricing model by implementing a base fee per gas managed by the network. For more informations you can check the github page : https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-1559.md. Other solutions include sidechains which are a "layer 2" scaling solution enabling to lighten the main network.

MetaMask – Huge Suggested Fees on MetaMask Post EIP-1559

maxPriorityFeePerGas should normally be around 1.5 to 3.0 (2.5 is actually the setting that Web3js and Ethersjs use to account for 'MEV Heavy' blocks). This parameter is often incorrectly configured by metamask and will make the value the same as your maxFeePerGas, hence the crazy pricing.

You can use this API if you would like:

curl -sL api.txprice.com | jq

This API is a proxy to Blocknatives Gas Pricing Service. They have a chrome extension as well. (Note: my employer operates this endpoint, we do not track user data besides requests per min from IPs).

It will provide you with confidence interval-based pricing for transaction costs.

If you would like to see how other services/API providers produce their results here is a Gas Reporting Index (note: my own work):

https://github.com/sambacha/gas-reporting

Best Answer

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transactions – How to Minimize Fees for Sending $20 Worth of USDC

MetaMask – Huge Suggested Fees on MetaMask Post EIP-1559

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