What are the gas fees for different Ethereum-compatible chains?
So we all know that the Ethereum Mainnet is slow and very costly. But what is costly and how do other options compare? Is your new DeFi or smart contract going to be affordable? Below is a summary of other options and their gas fees. For each chain, one minting contract was deployed and one coin was minted. All were done on Testnets instead of Mainnet. The chains that were tested were: Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Polygon/Matic, Arbitrum/Optimistic, Optimism, Polkadot/Moonbeam, Fantom, Kucoin, RSK, Kucoin and PAO. Who do you think was cheapest? Of course gas prices change as well as token valuations.
The contract
The Solidity contract which was deployed was:
// contracts/bsc_token.sol
// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity ^0.8.0;import “@openzeppelin/contracts/token/ERC20/ERC20.sol”;
import “@openzeppelin/contracts/access/Ownable.sol”;contract BEP20 is Ownable, ERC20 {
constructor() ERC20(“BEP20Test”, “BPT”) { }
function mint(address to, uint256 amount) public onlyOwner {
_mint(to, amount);
}
function burn(address account, uint256 amount) public onlyOwner {
_burn(account, amount);
}
}
Remix was used for compilation and deployment. Except for Optimism no changes were made and the same compiler was used.
Ethereum (Ropsten)
Deploying the contract was 0.00179 ETH, which at $3,004.83 equals to $5.3786. Minting a coin was 0.000071 ETH or $0.21334.
Binance Smart Chain
Deploying the contract was 0.017866 BNB, which at $380.38 equals to $6.7958 [MORE EXPENSIVE THAN ETHEREUM!]. Minting a coin was 0.000375 BNB or $0.1426425.
Avalanche
Deploying the contract was 0.044745 AVAX, which at $65.62 equals to $2.9362 [Half of Binance, 45% cheaper than Ethereum]. Minting a coin was 0.001785 AVAX or $0.1171317.
Polygon (Previously called Matic)
Deploying the contract was 0.007159 MATICMUM, which at $1.13 equals to $0.00808967 [REALLY CHEAP!]. Minting a coin was 0.000286 MATICMUM or $0.00032318. Code was deployed as is. This is not what you would do for a production deployment which involves tokens given that a sidechain might get compromised more easily than Ethereum Mainnet. See documentation regarding Polygon on how to rewrite the contract correctly.
Arbitrum/Optimistic
Deploying the contract was 0.001291 ETH, which at $3,004.83 equals to $3.87923553. Minting a coin was 0.000023 ETH or $0.06911109.
Optimism
Deploying the contract was 0.000051 ETH, which at $3,004.83 equals to $0.153246. Minting a coin was 0.000013 ETH or $0.03906279. Optimism unlike other solutions required quite some code changes [flattening openzeppelin files; removing keywords like inline, virtual, abstract; rewriting constructors with attributes,…] before the contract worked and a special compiler to optimise the code. Speed was substantially faster than the Ethereum Testnet though.
Polkadot / Moonbeam
Moonbeam Alpha was used which has the DEV token which is not tradable. However when using Moonriver [Moonbeam’s Mainnet] exactly the same token amount in MOVR came up. Deploying the contract was 0.001787 DEV, which at $352.13 equals to $0.62625631. Minting a coin was 0.000068 DEV or $0.02394484.
Fantom
Deploying the contract was 0.002686 FTM, which at $1.22 equals to $0.00327692 [REALLY, REALLY CHEAP!]. Minting a coin was 0.000108
FTM or $0.00013176.
Kucoin
Deploying the contract was 0.00179 KCS, which at $9.93 equals to $0.0177747 [CHEAP!]. Minting a coin was 0.000071
KCS or $0.00070503.
RSK
Deploying the contract was 0.000141TRBTC, which at $43,111.67 equals to $6.07874547. Minting a coin was 0.000004 TRBTC or $0.17244668. Of course this is not Ethereum but Bitcoin.
PAO
Deploying the contract was 0.035796 SPOA, which at $0.026680 equals to $0.00095503728 [EXTREMELY CHEAP!]. Minting a coin was 0.001428
SPOA or $0.00003809904.
Conclusion
Newer Ethereum-compatible chains tend to have lower gas prices and most importantly a cheaper token. However the more popular a chain gets, the higher the token value becomes. This is great for investors and validators but anybody building a token economy on top might see their business case collapse when transactions go from $0.000955 to $6.7985 for basically the same transaction. Chains should put a mechanism in place to periodically adjust the gas fees charged based on the token value. If not all that great engineering to have a speedier Ethereum competitor might be in vane.
If you would like to see other non-native EVM chains be compared as well, please like this blog post. If enough people like it, happy to put in the effort. If you think an important EVM chain was forgotten, please put that in the comments. Token values were take on 1 October 2021 and can have changed. Also projects might adjust their gas fees. So before you take a final decision, please validate that this data is still accurate.
No responsibility will be taken for any economical or other loss due to this blog post. This post is not financial advise.
