What is Gas?
Crypto Glossary Definition
The internal pricing for running a transaction or contract on Ethereum.
Why Gas Matters
Gas is the fee paid to the network to process a transaction or run a smart contract — think of it as a variable "processing fee" that rises when the network is congested. On Ethereum, gas is priced in Gwei, and a complex transaction (like an NFT mint) costs far more gas than a simple transfer.
Gas in Practice
A collector trying to mint a limited NFT drop opens her wallet the moment the mint goes live and watches the estimated gas fee jump dramatically compared to what it was an hour earlier, since thousands of other users are trying to submit the same type of transaction at once and competing for limited block space. She has to decide whether to pay the elevated fee immediately to improve her odds of getting included in the next block before the collection sells out, or wait and risk missing the mint entirely while hoping fees settle down. She ultimately pays it, watching the transaction go through with a gas cost several times higher than a simple token transfer would have cost on a quiet day, since minting involves more computational steps for the network to execute and verify. Later that evening, once the initial rush dies down, she sends a small amount of ETH to a friend and notices the gas fee for that simple transfer is a small fraction of what the mint cost her earlier. The experience teaches her to think of gas the way she'd think of surge pricing on a delivery app: the underlying service isn't changing, but the price to get it done quickly moves with real-time demand for limited network capacity.
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