Gas fees are the costs associated with initiating a transaction on a given blockchain, allowing network validators to perform the requested function.
Gas fees can fluctuate due to network congestion, the type of transaction you request, and the priority placed on your request. You can accelerate a transaction by paying additional gas fees.
Each blockchain has its own native asset required to pay these fees. When interacting with the blockchain, you’ll need to account for the amount of this native asset required for the requested transaction.
You can estimate transaction fees and contract execution with Circle’s Programmable Wallets APIs.
Video Tutorial: Estimating Gas Fees for Transactions
Watch this video to learn about gas fees, also known as transaction fees. In the video, you will learn the importance of gas fees, understand how to estimate fees for a transfer transaction using an API and send USDC to other wallets using the estimates.
When initiating a request via Circle’s Programmable Wallets APIs that require gas fees, you have two options for configuring your fee tolerance: fee levels and gas limits.
Fee levels provide a simple way to configure your gas tolerance. Depending on your choice, the speed in which your transaction completes compared to the expected blockchain confirmation timing may vary.
You can choose between three tolerance levels:
low- a low-priority transaction, expected to take longer than the average amount of time to complete, with lower feesmedium- a medium-priority transaction, expected to take the average amount of time to complete, with average feeshigh- a high-priority transaction, expected to take less than the average amount of time to complete, with higher fees
Gas limits allow for a more advanced configuration of your gas tolerance. Setting gas limit requires the following parameters, which are all designated in wei:
gasLimit- the base amount of gas required to process the requested transactionpriorityFee- an additional “tip” that can be added to the validator to accelerate the requested transactionmaxFee- maximum fee that can be used for the requested transaction, if the fee is greater, the transaction will be failed. Note that Solana has no concept of a max fee.
Differences in gas fee specification
Differences in gas fee specification
While EVM chains and Solana support fee levels, you can also assign your own gas fee. The process differs based on the blockchain and protocols supported.
EVM chains
EVM chains
When creating a transfer transaction, you must specify gasLimit, maxFee, and priorityFee. Your actual fee will be (base fee + priority fee) * gas used . Note that you do not need to specify the base fee in your transaction because it is automatically determined and adjusted by the network based on its current congestion level.
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priorityFeeis not applicable to Arbitrum and can be left blank.
- Base fee: Fee set by the network based on congestion levels. It is burned with a transaction, which means it is removed from circulation.
- Priority fee: Additional fee paid to miners that expedites your transaction.
- Max fee: Maximum price you're willing to pay per unit of gas for the transaction. This protects against paying excessive prices when the base fee rises unexpectedly.
Solana
Solana
The gas fee mechanism is similar to EIP-1559, where you can specify the priority fee to incentivize miners to include your transaction in a block. However, there's no max fee concept in Solana, and the gasLimit is optional as Solana defaults to a gas limit of 200,000 micro-lamport (10^-15 SOL).
Updated 16 days ago
