Introduction to Gas

To understand how gas is computed and how gas units work on NEAR Protocol, we need to read through their documentation

Here is a brief explanation of some terms we will use in this dashboard:

• Gas units: internally, transaction fees are not calculated directly in NEAR tokens, but instead go through an in-between phase of "gas units". The benefit of gas units is that they are deterministic – the same transaction will always cost the same number of gas units.

• Gas price: gas units are then multiplied by a gas price to determine how much to charge users. This price is automatically recalculated each 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% each block), and bottoms out at a price that's configured by the network, currently 100 million yoctoNEAR.

• 1 TGas (TeraGas) is equal to 10¹² gas units ≈ 1 millisecond of "compute" time ...which, at a minimum gas price of 100 million yoctoNEAR, equals a 0.1 milliNEAR charge

  \

> GAS used will be calculated in TGAS (i.e., 10¹² gas units)

We can very well observe the drop in the number of transactions on 8-11 June, 2022. This drop also directly correlates to the gas price as tgas reduced to 29M to 7M in just 3 days as seen in chart on top right.

Similarly,

Further on, we will get a clearer picture of the gas prices for NEAR transactions by viewing the below chart for moving averages

Which NEAR contracts are attracting the most gas fee ?

Gas spent is calculated in TGAS units, and transaction fee in NEAR

Since NEAR Gas prices are dependent upon the blocks and network demand, we will try to identify some trends from the below charts

What is Aurora? This same contract contributes to more than 65% of NEAR traffic!

Summary:

• NEAR gas prices are dependent on block congestion and network demand, verified by on-chain metrics.
• 34.8 TGAS was the most gas spent per transaction on June 10th, 2022 as per Weekly MA’s chart over the past month.
• May 2, 2022, recorded the highest total gas spent in a day with 30M TGAS.
• There was a sharp decline in network demand, gas prices and number of transactions from June 8th to June 11th, 2022 as seen on the charts above. This decline can also be observed on the drop in transaction fees collected.
• Aurora is an EVM compatible Ethereum-L2 chain built on top of NEAR. This is the contract on which users have spent the most gas on contributing to almost 65% of total traffic on NEAR protocol.
• Aurora accounts for 100M TGAS spent on its contract over the past 30 days. and 29M TGAS over the past week.
• Near.crowd contributes to the second highest gas spent on contracts with 5M TGAS in the past week and 19M TGAS in the past month.