Gas (Transaction Fees)
The fee paid to process a transaction on a blockchain, priced in the network's native asset and rising with congestion; Layer 2s charge far less.
- glossary
Gas is the unit of computational work required to execute an operation on a blockchain like Ethereum or Base. Users pay a gas fee — denominated in the chain's native asset (ETH on Ethereum and Base, MATIC on Polygon, etc.) — to compensate validators for processing the transaction. Gas fees vary with network congestion: minting an NFT on Ethereum mainnet can cost meaningfully more during busy periods than on quiet days. Layer-2 networks like Base typically charge a small fraction of mainnet gas, which is why many tokenization platforms operate there. For tokenizing or transferring a domain, expect to pay a one-time gas fee per on-chain action (mint, transfer, list, etc.) — usually small relative to the registrar fees. Reference: Ethereum.org's gas explainer.
Related keywords
- gas
- gas fee
- transaction fee
- gwei
- Ethereum gas
- Base gas
- L2 fees
- mint cost
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.