NFT Guide: How To Win In NFT Gas Wars
This article explains what are gas wars in the NFT metaverse, how to save money during an NFT drop and not lose the great gas wars. This means that you'll be able to mint your NFT without overpaying.
What Is A Gas War?
Have you ever heard people mention something about the gas wars? What even is it? Well, a gas war can happen during a popular NFT collection’s mint launch. Ethereum charges a fee to handle transactions and create contracts on the blockchain itself, a fee they call the “gas fee” – a fee that gets transferred directly to miners that are pumping out the computation power necessary to verify transactions in the first place. An easy way to understand how the gas fee works can be found here. If this article helps you in any way, consider subscribing. It’s free.
How To Win The War
After you ‘mint’ through the project website, MetaMask will open your wallet with the default details of the tx1. The default amount of gas fees generated automatically by MetaMask will open up, with the total amount including mint price. Click on ‘EDIT’ function underneath ‘DETAILS’.
Click the ‘Fast’ gas option, this will cost more but will generally be faster too. This is explained thoroughly in my gas article. One thing to note, this may not be fast enough for extremely hyped drops. How do you win? Keep reading.
Click ‘Advanced’ and the price to input here will depend on the degree of hype surrounding a particular drop. Generally speaking, 50-80 gwei is usually safe, BUT, on extremely hyped drops this is not enough. Do not touch the gas limit as MetaMask will have input the correct gas limit needed to mint the NFT. This is where gas wars start.
The best way to win in a gas war is to equip yourself with useful tools, a fast reaction, and spare some ETH to spare for gas. 3 extremely valuable resources will tell you what to input in the ‘Gas Price (GWEI)’ box. The first is found at Etherscan.
The website will tell you the latest mined block, and more importantly the average gas price in the previous block. The second resource I tend to use is GasNow.
This will provide you will the average in pending blocks. These are the numbers to look at more closely when minting. GasNow has a Google Chrome application where pinning the app can show up-to-date gwei prices without having to open the website.
Another useful app that also can be found in the Chrome store is called ‘Ethereum Gas Prices’. It also shows current gas prices from 3 different sources listed below.
The input for the gas price back in the MetaMask wallet should be x + 10 gwei. This will be the most simple and cost-effective way of being ahead of 90% of all other transactions during peak times. The only way your tx can fail is if 100% of the people in the block having a higher gwei amount. The gas wars create a loop of FOMO for people trying to mint NFTs in time before it runs out. They bid over each other, throwing everyone else under the bus to overpay in price. Some people say that they will automatically input a set number like ‘400’ or ‘700’ as the gwei.
There is no need for this. For example, if the second highest gwei in that particular block was 40 and someone were to input 400, the only output would be spending 10x the amount of gas needed. It’s just like paying $400 in fuel at a gas station to fill your car, when it only takes $40 in fuel at market price. Basically donating ETH miners $360, you might as well use that money for a charity you support rather than just burning it. Of course in a competitive world like NFTs, there will never be situations where everyone bids low during a massively hyped drop.
The following graph from GasNow depicts an Art Block NFT drop with a 1000 max supply and a max of 1 mint per tx. The average gwei within the hour window hit 1000 gwei. This is not the actual peak as it is an average, with some users reportedly hitting over a peak of 1430 gwei at the peak. It’s rare though, usually lasting a few blocks.
⌛ Conclusion
Just take the current gas prices and add +10 gwei. Make sure you are fast, before
the current block gets mined, otherwise you risk falling behind when the next block comes along and you are still pending tx. Click ‘Close’ and ‘Confirm’. That now should be able to get your transaction confirmed if you did it right. You are now done! Be careful if you see the current block being mined, and your gwei input is significantly lower than the current stats in your tools. Cancel the tx and re-mint.
The following is an excel spreadsheet to calculate gas prices, you can find it here.
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tx: Transaction