Everything You Need to Know About AVAX Gas Fees

If you have ever conducted any transactions on the Avalance network, you’ve surely had to pay AVAX gas fees.

This article aims to shed some light on what AVAX gas fees are, how they work, and how to calculate them.

What Are AVAX Gas Fees?

Launched as an Ethereum rival in 2020, Avalanche represents a layer-1 blockchain featuring smart contracts and decentralized applications. 

Similar to Ethereum, it requires its users to pay transaction fees. These fees help to prevent spam and keep the network secure.

For this purpose, it offers a native currency AVAX which is deducted from their addresses upon every transaction. 

An interesting fact is that these fees don’t remain within the network. The system burns them automatically to reduce the amount of AVAX in circulation and thus increase its value in time.

AVAX Gas Fees’ Structure

As Avalanche features different chains for different purposes, it also has a different AVAX gas fee structure for each of them.

For example, in order to create a subnet on the P-chain one has to pay 1 AVAX as a network fee. 

At the same time, the fee for sending funds or minting assets on the X-chain is only 0.001 AVAX. 

Finally, the fee for sending funds on the C-chain which is an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine is dynamic and depends on a number of different factors.

You may find the full fee schedule in the official documentation of the project.

Interestingly, although Avalanche has a predefined fee structure, it is totally under the community’s control. It means that it may become subject to changes if the community comes up with a new proposal and the majority of the network participants vote in its favor.

What Factors Influence Avalanche Gas Fees?

As mentioned earlier, transactions that take place on the C-chain are dynamic. This means that they change with respect to the current conditions of the network.

Avalanche relies on an internal algorithm to calculate the “base fee” for every transaction. This fee grows when the network gets highly congested and decreases in the opposite scenario. Crypto wallets such as Metamask calculate this fee automatically, but it is also possible to increase the fee manually to speed up the transactions.

Also, users can determine dynamic fees on specific subchains. We will give a more detailed guide on how to calculate these fees below.

AVAX Gas Fees Tracker

There are a few web services designed for tracking AVAX gas fees. Below, we have listed some of the most popular options.

1. SnowTrace: This gas fee tracker comes as an integral part of the Avalanche blockchain explorer created by the Avalanche developers themselves. With the support of the core team members, it provides the most accurate and relevant data about the current size of transaction fees.
2. Stats.avax.network: This is one more blockchain explorer offered by the Avalanche platform. It offers many user-friendly graphs and data tables including daily and monthly gas usage. The information it provides can be particularly useful for data scientists and blockchain research specialists.
3. CoinTool: This is an on-chain analytical platform that provides its users with a convenient dashboard to track various aspects of the most popular blockchains. AVAX gas tracker is one of the features that it offers out-of-the-box.

These are the top AVAX gas trackers available at the time of writing. As the Avalanche network evolves, more gas trackers are sure to emerge helping users to save money on the network fees.

AVAX Gas Fees Calculator

To understand how Avalanche calculates its dynamic fees, it’s important to introduce the following terms:

• Gas fee cap is the maximum price per unit of gas that a user is willing to pay. For a translation to be successful, it must be more or equal to the base fee.
• Gas tip cap (priority fee) is the maximum price per unit of gas that the user agrees to pay above the base price.

Thus, the formula for AVAX gas fees calculation will be as follows:

EffectiveTip = min(MaxFeeCap - BaseFee, GasTipCap)

Remember, though, that Avalanche doesn’t send these fees to the miners like Ethereum and other networks do. Instead, it burns both the base fee and everything users pay on top.

AVAX Gas Fees Chart and History

The official Avalanche blockchain explorer mentioned above provides a nice historical graph of its gas fees.

An interesting fact is that every time Ava Labs implements specific network upgrades, the AVAX gas fees drop and practically do not ever get back to the previous levels.

Thus, when the platform released the Apricot Phase 1 upgrade on March 31st, 2021, the fees halved. The same happened after the Phase 3 release in August 2021.

AVAX Faucet for Gas Fees

Avalanche has an official faucet at Core.app where both developers and end-users can obtain some free AVAX coins to cover transaction fees.

End-users may obtain free AVAX airdrop by bridging over $75 worth of assets through the Core.app bridge to the Avalanche blockchain.

Developers using Avalanche testnet can rely on the corresponding faucet. Note that these tokens have no value and they only work within the testnet itself.

Current AVAX Gas Fees

At the time of writing, Avalanche charges around 25.7 nAVAX for the transaction of a standard speed which takes more than 30 seconds to accomplish.

For fast (10-30 sec) and rapid (<10 sec) transactions, the fee equals 26.2 and 26.7 nAVAX correspondingly.

Note that the fees constantly change as their size depends on the number of users who try to send funds at every given moment.