Transaction Fee

Transaction Fees on Glide

Glide is designed to be EVM equivalent, which means it reuses the same Ethereum code you're already familiar with and behaves as much like Ethereum as possible. However, transaction fees on all Layer 2 systems need to diverge from Ethereum to some extent for a number of reasons. This page provides a detailed look at exactly how transaction fees work on Glide so you can properly account for them in your application.

Glide transaction fees are composed of an Execution Gas Fee and an L1 Data Fee. The total cost of a transaction is the sum of these two fees. Continue reading to learn more about exactly how each of these fee components are charged.

Execution Gas Fee

A transaction's execution gas fee is exactly the same fee that you would pay for the same transaction on Ethereum. This fee is equal to the amount of gas used by the transaction multiplied by the gas price attached to the transaction. Like Ethereum, Glide uses the EIP-1559 mechanism to set the base fee for transactions. The total price per unit gas that a transaction pays is the sum of the base fee and the optional additional priority fee.

Because Glide is EVM equivalent, the gas used by a transaction on Glide is exactly the same as the gas used by the same transaction on Ethereum. If a transaction costs 100,000 gas on Ethereum, it will cost 100,000 gas on Glide. The only difference is that the gas price on Glide is much lower than the gas price on Ethereum so you'll end up paying much less in ETH.

For this component of the fee, you can estimate the total cost of a transaction using the same tools you would use to estimate the cost of a transaction on Ethereum. You can read more about how Ethereum's gas fees work over on Ethereum.org.

Base Fee

The base fee is the minimum price per unit of gas that a transaction must pay to be included in a block. Transactions must specify a maximum base fee higher than the block base fee to be included. The actual fee charged is the block base fee, even if the transaction specifies a higher maximum base fee.

The Glide base fee behaves exactly like the Ethereum base fee with a few small parameter changes to account for the much shorter block times on Glide. None of these parameters should significantly impact your application.

Priority Fee

Just like on Ethereum, Glide transactions can specify a priority fee. This priority fee is a price per unit of gas that is paid on top of the base fee. For example, if the block base fee is 1 gwei and the transaction specifies a priority fee of 1 gwei, the total price per unit of gas is 2 gwei. The priority fee is an optional component of the execution gas fee and can be set to 0.

The Glide sequencer will prioritize transactions with a higher priority fee and execute them before any transactions with a lower priority fee. If transaction speed is important to your application, you may want to set a higher priority fee to ensure that your transaction is included more quickly. The eth_maxPriorityFeePerGasRPC method can be used to estimate a priority fee that will get your transaction included quickly.

L1 Data Fee

The L1 Data Fee is the only part of the Glide transaction fee that differs from the Ethereum transaction fee. This fee arises from the fact that the transaction data for all Glide transactions is published to Ethereum. This guarantees that the transaction data is available for nodes to download and execute. The L1 Data Fee accounts for the cost to publish an Glide transaction to Ethereum and is primarily determined by the current base fee on Ethereum. After the Ecotone upgrade, OP Stack chains will have the option of posting transactions using blobs. For blob-enabled chains, the current Ethereum blob data gas price will largely determine the L1 data fee.

Mechanism

The L1 Data Fee is automatically charged for any transaction that is included in an Glide block. This fee is deducted directly from the address that sent the transaction. The exact amount paid depends on the estimated size of the transaction in bytes after compression, the current Ethereum gas price and/or blob gas price, and several small parameters.

The L1 Data Fee is most heavily influenced by the Ethereum base fee that is continuously and trustlessly relayed from Ethereum to Glide. With the Ecotone upgrade, the Ethereum blob base fee also gets relayed to Glide, and will become the most important factor for chains configured to use blobs instead of base fee. The base fee and blob base fee are updated on Glide for every Ethereum block, and each fluctuates at most by 12.5% between updates. As a result, short-term fluctuations of the L1 Data Fee are generally quite small and should not impact the average transaction.

Max fee

To execute a transaction on the network, users can specify a maximum limit they are willing to pay for their transaction to be executed. This optional parameter is known as the maxFeePerGas. For a transaction to be executed, the max fee must exceed the sum of the base fee and the tip. The transaction sender is refunded the difference between the max fee and the sum of the base fee and tip.

Block size

Each block has a target size of 15 million gas, but the size of blocks will increase or decrease in accordance with network demand, up until the block limit of 30 million gas (2x the target block size). The protocol achieves an equilibrium block size of 15 million on average through the process of tâtonnement. This means if the block size is greater than the target block size, the protocol will increase the base fee for the following block. Similarly, the protocol will decrease the base fee if the block size is less than the target block size. The amount by which the base fee is adjusted is proportional to how far the current block size is from the target. More on blocks.