Are you busy doing transactions on the Ethereum blockchain? Are you tired of paying way more for a transaction than necessary? If your answer to that question is yes, then you probably shouldn’t use the Ethereum blockchain at all. After all, you can easily face gas fees of 100 Gwei or more, which can make you pay more than $10 for a simple Ethereum transfer on the blockchain. If you have to interact with a smart contract, transfer ERC20 tokens, or trade on Uniswap or Sushiswap, you can easily end up paying more than $100 for a single transaction. That is depressing, and hopefully, it will get better as Ethereum 2.0 will launch. But until then, what can you do to interact with the Ethereum blockchain as cheaply as possible? The best answer is to do your transactions when the gas prices are as low as possible!
At the time of writing this article, I have seen the gas prices range between 40 Gwei and 200 Gwei in the last couple of days. During extreme and crazy events (like a special NFT collection made available for sale or something similar) we have even seen gas prices between 400-800 Gwei. But, that isn’t normal at all. But, seeing the gas price at a level of 100 is, unfortunately, quite normal.
Is there an easy way to track the actual gas prices, and thus, make transactions when the prices are at their lowest? It is, of course, impossible to know that the prices actually are at the lowest right then (and that they won’t go lower later), but still, you can at least have a feeling that you do not overpay a lot. How can it be done?
Bye bye GasNow
For a long time, gasnow.org was a fantastic tool, not only because it showed the actual gas prices at their website, but they also had a plugin that could show you the actual gas prices constantly in your browser. But, due to the Chinese crackdown on miners, the mining pool actually running the service decided to shut down gasnow.org as well (this happened on October 15th in 2021).
But, are there any other options that will give you mostly the same service? Luckily, there is!
Etherscan is good for gas prices as well!
Etherscan is a fantastic tool for checking transactions, taking a closer look at statistics, and so much more. And yes, it has turned into an awesome tool for showing gas prices as well.
The website you need to visit is: https://etherscan.io/gastracker
When you visit the link above, you will see a page looking something like the screenshot above. Here you can see that at the time of writing, the gas price is approximately 54 Gwei. You can also see how much a normal transfer will cost on the Ethereum blockchain right now based on this information.
This is really useful, and the page is updating itself every 10 seconds, making sure that you will see the actual gas fees constantly.
This leads to a question… Do I need to buy a separate monitor that will show this page all day along with so that I can see what’s happening? That could be a very good solution, and you could also add some charts and other trading-related windows to the screen, and it would be a fantastic solution. But, there is another method to solve this that doesn’t involve you buying a second monitor.
Show the actual gas prices in your browser all the time
Have you opened the link above to the Etherscan website? Take a look at the open tabs you have in your browser. Right now, it looks something like this to me.
Do you see where the arrow is pointing? Even if I look at a different tab, I will still see the actual gas price in the tab overview in my browser. As a result, I can write articles, watch a movie on Netflix, or do trading on Binance, and still keep an eye on the tab to see the constant movements of the Ethereum gas prices. It might not be as perfect as the former GasNow application, but it is still working very well and it will give you lots of help as you try to make transactions on the Ethereum blockchain when the gas prices are down.
This is my favorite solution for showing gas prices right now. Have you used Etherscan as well for this purpose? Or are you using some other website or service doing the same? https://ethgasstation.info/ is a great service as well, but since they do not show the actual gas prices in the tab, it means that you have to constantly watch the website, something tha might feel complicated unless you have several monitors.
