An overview of NEAR gas

The persons in charge of maintaining the blockchain's infrastructure are charged for each call you make to the NEAR blockchain to update or modify data. Your request is ultimately processed by computers somewhere, and the validators operating those machines invest a significant sum of money to maintain them operational.

Transaction costs, also known as gas fees, are how NEAR pays these workers, much like other programmable blockchains.

A significant distinction between blockchains and web2 cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, etc.) is that consumers are paid right away when they contact an app, as opposed to developers covering the cost of employing all that infrastructure. New opportunities arise as a result, such as applications with no long-term danger of disappearing because of a developer's or company's financial difficulties. A few usability stumbling blocks are there, however. NEAR offers developers the option to pay for users' petrol expenses in order to mitigate this and provide web2 users a more familiar experience.

Two ideas should be kept in mind while thinking about gas:

• Internally, "gas units" are used as a transitional unit between NEAR tokens and the actual calculation of transaction fees. The advantage of gas units is their determinism, which guarantees that a given transaction will always cost the same amount of gas units.
• The amount that consumers will be charged is calculated by multiplying the number of gas units by the gas price. This price is automatically recalculated every block depending on network demand (if previous block is more than half full the price goes up, otherwise it goes down, and it won't change by more than 1% every block), and it bottoms out at a price that is configured by the network, at the moment 100 million yoctoNEAR.

Question:

• What contracts are users spending the most gas on to use?
• How has this changed over the past week?
• How has this changed over the past month?

Methodology:

• We examine the near.core.fact_transactions table to discover the top ten contracts on which users spend the most gas to utilize the NEAR ecosystem.
• The change in gas used in the top 10 contracts during the past week, month, and year is then visualized.
• We then visualize the distribution of NEAR deposited by users who transfer tokens to the top 10 contracts to identify the type of users who utilized the top 10 contracts.

The pie chart displays the top 10 contracts with the most gas usage. At 71.6 percent, it can be seen that the Aurora contract utilizes the most gas from NEAR users. App.neatcrowd.near contract has the second-highest gas usage among NEAR users, at 12.9%, followed by V2.nearapps.near contract with 3.49 percent. Near contract has the lowest gas usage among the top 10 contracts, at 0.955%. According to the pie chart, the Aurora contract accounts for the majority of NEAR users' gas usage.

The above bar graph demonstrates the daily amount of gas spent by users to execute the top 10 contracts over the past week. After the 22nd of July, the trend of the daily amount of gas use appears to be consistent. We discovered that Aurora's gas usage exhibits a highly dominant trend over time. In addition, we found that the daily gas usage and the daily number of transactions move in the same direction. For instance, the drop in transaction volume between July 21 and July 22 has an effect on the decrease in gas use.

The above bar graph depicts the daily quantity of gas used by users to execute the top 10 contracts over the past month. The pattern of the daily quantity of gas use appears to be unstable and peaks between July 15 and July 21. Similar to the graph of Aurora's daily gas use over the last week, the gas usage demonstrates a very dominant tendency over time. Moreover, we discovered that the daily gas usage and the daily number of transactions move in the same manner. For example, the increase in transaction volume between July 15 and July 21 contributes to the growth in gas use.

The bar chart above illustrates the daily amount of gas spent by users to complete the top 10 contracts since the beginning of 2022. The daily quantity of gas used seems to be fluctuating, with a peak on January 17. We also discovered that Aurora's daily gas usage demonstrates the prevailing trend across the time period studied. Similarly, we noticed that the daily gas use and daily number of transactions move in the same direction as the daily gas chart of the last week and month.

Summary:

• We determined that the Aurora contract accounted for the vast majority of NEAR users' gas use.
• Considering the daily chart for the last week, we saw that the pattern of the daily quantity of gas used appears to be stable.
• Considering the daily chart for the last month and the beginning of 2022, we noticed that the tendency of the daily quantity of gas consumption looks unsteady.
• We discovered that the daily consumption of fuel and the daily volume of transactions move in the same direction.
• We noticed that the majority of users that transfer their NEAR tokens to the top ten contracts are regular users.

The bar chart on the left illustrates the distribution of NEAR deposited by users who transfer tokens to the top 10 contracts. Users classified as Shrimp who deposit between $0 and $10 in NEAR tokens are the most likely to utilize the top 10 contracts, with 47 users. Users classified as Crab and depositing between $10 and $100 in NEAR tokens have the second-highest number of users, with 7 users. Meanwhile, we discovered only one Whale user. As a result of this finding, the majority of users that transfer their NEAR tokens to the top 10 contracts are normal people.