Flipside's World Cup Kick Off: Gas Guzzlers
Questions:
create a gas tracking dashboard that looks at gas usage by a chain over the last couple of months. Include Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Algorand, Flow, NEAR, Optimism, Arbitrum and Osmosis, and answer following questions:
- Total amount USD of gas spent on the chain in the last 30 days.
- Average cost of gas in USD per $1,000,000 of liquidity transferred on each chain 30 days
- Average block gas price hourly and daily
- The top 10 addresses on each chain that spend the most on gas in the past month
- Daily amount spent on gas by chain tracked over the last 30 days
- Chart gas spend to network token price

Introduction:
What Is a Gas Fee on NFTs?
Gas fee is a commonly used term for the cost that certain blockchain protocol users pay to network validators each time they wish to perform a function on the blockchain.
Gas serves as an incentive for network validators to record transactions accurately and behave honestly in the upkeep of the protocol.
While Ethereum and Polygon use the term “gas fees,” other blockchains such as Solana and Bitcoin use the term “transaction fees.” “Gas” comes from the fee’s similarity to the fuel which keeps a vehicle running.
On proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains such as Ethereum, gas fees are paid by end users to the miners for validating their transactions. Miners compete using specialized computing equipment to generate random codes called hashes. The first miner able to randomly generate a cryptographic hash starting with the same number of zeroes (or more) compared to the “target hash” is declared the winner.
The successful miner can then fill the new block with pending transactions. This earns the miner newly created cryptocurrency distributed from the block reward and any fees attached to those transactions.
Gas fees are also important in blockchain protocols using the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, such as the next evolution of Ethereum, Ethereum 2.0. On these blockchains, gas fees reward validators who first commit a certain amount of cryptocurrency to the network in order to be selected to verify new transactions.
Those who lock away more coins can run more validators, making them more likely to be selected to validate new transactions than those who commit fewer coins. However, some programmatic randomness at the protocol level means this isn’t guaranteed and validators with fewer coins can still be selected to validate transactions and earn the block reward.










Methodology:
In this dashboard, we are going to compare 9 of the largest blockchains in terms of gas spent. Blockchains are included Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Algorand, Flow, NEAR, Optimism, Arbitrum and Osmosis.
At first, I tried to answer questions for each blockchain separately and then compare all of them.
The following metrics show in each blockchain section:
- Daily fee spent in USD - sum the fees of all the transactions made in the desired blockchain every day. The unit of fees is the native token of their network (except for Optimism and Arbitrum, which is ETH). So to get USD we have to multiply by the average price of the token on the same day.
- Average of total fee spent on Ethereum each day and hour - sum the fees of all transactions made in the desired blockchain by day of the week and hour. Then, we get the average fee spent per hour of the weekdays. In this way, we know what days and hours the network is congested.
- Hourly fee spent per block in USD - sum the fees of all transactions made in the desired blockchains every block. Then, get the average of them per hour.
- Top 10 addresses that spend the most fee in the past 30 days - sum the total fee made by each wallet during past 30 days. Then find the top 10. I tried to figure out owner of these wallets too.
Key finding:
Total fee in USD spent: Ethereum > Polygon > Optimism > Arbitrum > Solana > Near > Osmosis > Algorand > Flow
Average transactions fee in USD spent: Ethereum > Optimism > Arbitrum > Polygon > Near > Osmosis > Algorand > Solana > Flow
Median transactions fee in USD spent: Ethereum > Optimism > Arbitrum > Polygon > Near > Osmosis > Algorand > Solana > Flow
Average fee in USD spent per $1,000,000 of liquidity transferred: Ethereum > Optimism > Polygon > Arbitrum > Osmosis > Near > Flow > Solana > Algorand
Average blocks fee in USD spent: Ethereum > Polygon > Optimism ~ Arbitrum > Near ~ Solana ~ Algorand > Flow