ETH Gas Meter & Gas Price Alert

Information on ETH Gas Meter and how to set up a Gas Price Alert

Valter avatar
Written by Valter
Updated over a week ago

ETH Gas Meter is a handy tool designed to give you a quick overview of the current Ethereum Network traffic in the app home screen. When the ETH Network is congested, you will also be able to set up a gas price alert and receive an app push notification to notify you when the gas fees go down.

ETH or ERC20 transactions initiated on the DeFi Wallet are submitted on-chain directly and require ETH as a network fee to incentivize the Ethereum Network to validate and confirm your transaction actions. Other than the fees that go to the network, DeFi Wallet does not charge any network fees. As there is only a fixed number of transactions per second the ETH network can validate and confirm, the ETH Network traffic determines the network fee for transacting ETH or ERC20 tokens, including swap and earn functions.

How do I understand the ETH Gas Meter?

You will see the ETH Gas Meter icon once you have updated your app to version 1.11.0 or above, the icon is at the upper left corner of your home screen and right next to the app settings icon.

We have briefly defined 3 tiers of ETH network traffic

  • Normal when gas price <= 110 Gwei

  • Busy when gas price > 110 Gwei and <=150 Gwei

  • Congested when gas price > 150 Gwei

So whenever you land on the app home screen, you will be able to see the current gas price in Gwei and the meter pointer pointing to the green/yellow/red zone to depict the traffic condition. For more details, you can tap the ETH Gas Meter icon and see the current 3 ETH network fee tiers - Slow / Average / Fast.

For your convenience, we have also projected the estimated network fee required based on the 3 fee tier for the below transactions, tap on each fee tier to see the corresponding estimations

  • Sending ERC20 token: using 210,000 gas limit

  • Swap or Earn related transactions: using 600,000 gas limit

Swap and Earn related transactions involving smart contract execution cost more than normal transfers as more computational power is required to execute the smart contracts set up by the DeFi protocols, hence a higher gas limit is required and this leads to a higher ETH network fee.

A good analogy is using driving a car to visualize the computational effort required for miners to validate and confirm your transaction on-chain -

  • “Gas price” is the price of gasoline at the moment based on market demand

  • “Gas limit” is the unit of gasoline required to drive a certain distance

View here to learn more about gas price (Gwei) and gas limit.

How do I set up a Gas Price Alert?

  • Tap the Gas Meter icon at the upper left corner of the app home screen

  • Check what’s the current average gas price in Gwei e.g. 243

  • Tap [Set Up Gas Price Alert]

  • Input your target gas price in Gwei e.g.100 and see the projected network fee for send, swap or earn ERC20 token

  • Tap [Confirm] and grant DeFi Wallet app push permission for the first time by tapping [Allow]

  • You will then receive a one-time push notification when gas price falls below 100 Gwei, feel free to edit the target gas price and/or toggle on the alert for future alerts

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