Avalanche is a high-performance blockchain platform designed to enable the creation and exchange of digital assets and decentralized applications. It uses a consensus protocol called Avalanche consensus that allows for near-instant finality and supports the creation of customizable subnets, each with its own set of validators and parameters. This unique architecture makes it highly scalable, able to process thousands of transactions per second while remaining secure and decentralized.

Gas fees on the Avalanche blockchain are relatively low compared to other L1 blockchains like Ethereum. This is because Avalanche uses a different fee structure called a Transaction Fee Model that calculates fees based on the size of the transaction, rather than the complexity of the smart contract being executed. This approach makes it easier for developers to predict the cost of their transactions and encourages the use of more complex smart contracts without incurring prohibitively high gas fees. Additionally, each subnet can demand transaction fees in its own currency, which provides greater flexibility and accessibility.

In this dashboard, the focus was to provide a definition for the measured indicators wherever they are presented. However, here is a list describing some of these indicators:

• Gas Limit: total gas limit provided by all transactions in the block.
• Gas Used: the total gas used in the block/transaction.
• Gas Filled: the percentage of gas used compared to the gas limit in the block.
• Base Fee Per Gas: the minimum gas price required for a transaction to be included in a block in nAVAX.
• Gas Price: cost per unit gas specified for the transaction in nAVAX.
• Transaction Fee: amount paid to the validator for processing the transaction in AVAX.
• Network Demand: measured using the number of transactions registered on a block.
• Contract: each single contract address that was used by the users of the network.
• DApp: the collection of multiple contract addresses attributed to a single decentralized application.

Mean vs Median

Throughout this analysis, both the mean and median values of gas fees were measured. However, considering the fact that the average values are more prone to outliers and sudden spikes in the measured indicator, the median values were considered the preferred way of averaging the gas fees since they are much closer to what users are experiencing the majority of times.

This dashboard is created using various parameters and structured in multiple tabs, each tackling a different aspect of gas fees on Avalanche.

Parameters

The first quarter of 2023 is selected by default with daily intervals. You can change the time frame by applying your desired dates using the start_date and end_date parameters. Also, it is best to switch to either weekly or monthly interval when selecting longer time frames. The contract parameter could be used to see the fee expenditure of your desired contract in the selected time frame.

Tabs

This dashboard has 6 different tabs addressing gas fees from a unique perspective.

• Blocks x Transactions: a deep dive into the gas fee fundamentals and its fluctuations in both the block and the transaction level.
• Network Demand: an investigation of the gas fee spikes based on demand using the number of transactions per block.
• Contracts: an overview of the contract addresses who paid the highest amount of generated gas.
• DApps: an aggregated evaluation of the contract addresses with the highest amount of generated gas on a DApp level.
• Users: a list of wallet addresses that paid the highest amount of gas fees.
• Heatmap: a cheatsheet of when is the best time to conduct a transaction on the network to pay the least fees.
• Expenditure: an overview of the gas fees expenditure of your desired contract in the selected time frame.

During the first quarter of 2023:

1. Overall Stats

• The generated fees by smart contracts on Avalanche have been more than 100k worth of AVAX tokens.
• Nearly 150k transactions have been registered on more than 40k blocks on a daily basis.

2. Blocks

• The median percentage of gas filled per block has been less than 10%.
• The base fee per gas has also been quite stable around 25 nAVAX for the majority of days.

3. Transactions

• On the transaction level, gas usage rarely surpassed 90% of the available gas limit.
• The median transaction fee and gas price have been quite low without major spikes, making Avalanche a relatively cheap blockchain.

4. Gas Filling

• The majority of the blocks on Avalanche were created by only using a portion of the available gas.
• Users finalized a significant share of transactions by nearly using 100% of the available gas.

5. Network Demand

• The number of transactions registered on a block was considered representative of the network demand.
• The concentration of validated blocks and the number of users conducting transactions have been higher on the lower number of transaction counts.
• The gas-filled per block passes the 70% threshold around the transactions count of 50, which is the level that the demand considerably fell off.
• The base fee per gas also remains relatively stable in sub-70 transaction count levels.
• The changes in fee and gas price per transaction have also been similar to the changes on the block level.
• While the percentage of gas filling increases linearly with the transaction count, the median base fee per gas has remained relatively constant over the whole transaction per block spectrum.
• For the majority of the transactions per block, the median gas price was in lower ranges near its minimum.
• The transaction fee has increased in levels around 50 and then, started to decrease in the infrequent ranges of higher transactions per block.

6. Contracts

• The contract addresses of Xen Crypto, Liquidity Book Token, and Wrapped Avax have been the top three ones with the highest generated fees and the highest used gas.
• The contract 0x9ab...e8595 had a significantly low gas filled percentage while having a higher median gas price compared to the others.

7. DApps

• Trader Joe has been the dominant DApp on Avalanche, generating over $16M in fees with the highest amount of gas usage, accounting for a total share of more than 60%.
• The median fee on Trader Joe was relatively cheap, while DApps such as Curve and GMX cost a higher fee per transaction for their users.
• DEXs are generating the highest amount of gas fees on Avalanche while having less than half of the total user share.
• DeFi and Token-related contracts have been the second and third types of contracts with the highest generated fees.