Historical Ethereum Gas Price Analysis

9 min readNov 24, 2020

(Featured Image Source: Chris Haws on Unsplashed)

In this article, we are going to explore the gas price trend for Ethereum and explain why it is important to track the gas price. First we want to explain how the gas price is determined and why gas is important in the Ethereum ecosystem. Then we will query the Anyblock ElasticSearch blockchain data API to obtain the desired information. Furthermore we will examine if there are patterns in the gas price trend. The last section is covering the method and a short tutorial for obtaining and visualizing the data.
In a second part, which will be released later, we want to compare gas prices between different networks.

How is the Gas Price determined?

Every operation in the Ethereum ecosystem requires gas. This means that every transaction, every smart contract execution, every operation in which something is computed and/or written on the blockchain does cost gas. Ethereum gas is a unit which describes the amount of computational effort an operation requires. Basically gas quantifies the work the nodes in Ethereum do. The unit for gas is the smallest fraction of the currency ETHER (1⁰¹⁸). Most of the time Gas is referred to as gwei (1⁰⁹).

Essentially gas fees are compensations for the computational work which is needed for every transaction, smart contract execution and deployment, and it is paid by the users which conduct the operation. The fee is awarded to miners, who verify the operations. The lower the user sets the gas price, the more likely the transaction will be ignored or takes a long time to process. Consequently if you set the gas price high, you can “skip the queue” and your operation is verified faster.

The gas price depends on many factors. Such as the amount of transactions, staking and investing in different tokens, and the amount of bytecode to process. Larger amounts of bytecode to process lead to higher transaction fees, because more gas is consumed.
For further information please visit: What is Ethereum Gas? [The Most Comprehensive Step-By-Step Guide Ever!].

Why do we need to track the Gas Price?

Understanding the gas price fluctuation is necessary to determine the optimal point in time to submit a transaction, trigger or deploy a smart contract. Under extreme conditions we can save a considerable amount of money (or time).
Therefore we are going to examine three different visualizations. First we are going to analyze the daily gas prices for a timespan of two years. We will try to find seasonal differences, analyze gas price spikes and interpret how they emerged.

In the second visualization the objective is to analyze the hourly gas price chart for the week of 5th October 2020 to 12th October 2020. In this chart we will examine the hourly gas price differences and search for patterns between different days of the week. A possible pattern to find would be clearly visible gas price differences between weekdays and weekends.

Last but not least we will examine the gas prices per minute for the past day. Here we hope to find daily patterns, which could save us money by submitting transactions at a point in time at which the gas price is low.

Gas Price Trends on Ethereum

Daily Gas Price

Let’s start with our first chart. In this chart we see the daily gas price and the percentiles for a slow (30.0 Percentile), standard (60.0 Percentile) and fast (90.0 Percentile) transfer, highlighted in blue, red and green. We plotted the daily prices for a timespan of 2 years.
The first observation that stands out is that the gas price was fairly consistent up until March 2020. The gas price for a fast transfer was mostly between 30–40 gwei. Before March 2020 a standard transfer required fees of 10–20 gwei. The price difference between a slow and standard transfer was mostly irrelevant. After the March 2020 spike, an upwards trend began. The gas price exploded. In the timeframe between March and October 2020 the gas price rose up to levels over 200 gwei. The fee for a fast transfer peaked at 750 gwei on September 17. A standard transfer on September 17 cost 561 gwei. Since September 17 we observe a downwards trend and the gas price reaches levels of 60–70 gwei.
There are certain ideas that try to explain the sudden surge of the gas price in March 2020 and the sharp upwards trend of the gas price since July 2020. Some argue that the March 2020 spike was on one hand caused by the Coronavirus pandemic resulting in a sell-off activity, which triggered a black swan event and ultimately a stock- as well as crypto-market sell-off and this chain reaction’s interaction with DeFi lending position liquidations caused by the crypto-market sell-off on the other hand. (See Peaster on Blockonomi). Some others (GAINS Associates on Medium) reason the upwards trend of the gas price with:

The surge of new ETH addresses: From less than 10 million addresses which did hold ETH in Q1 to over 40 million in Q3 of 2020.
Increasing network demand in ETH
Rise in Decentralized Finance smart contracts

Yet some others argue that the Ethereum fee model is contributing to the surge in gas price and that Ethereum 2.0 will resolve some gas price issues by using a proof-of-stake algorithm (Kordyban on Hedgetrade).

The two year chart shows no clear signs of seasonality effects. Conclusively it can be expected that the gas price will reach a constant level, albeit a higher level than before the gas price explosion.

Hourly Gas Price

Now let’s move on to the second chart in this blog article. In this chart we see the hourly gas price and the percentiles for a slow (30.0 Percentile), standard (60.0 Percentile) and fast (90.0 Percentile) transfer, highlighted in blue, red and green. We plotted the hourly prices for a timespan of 7 days.
There are a few different patterns we want to look into. First of all we want to look at the gas price difference between weekdays and weekends. Observing the chart shows that the lowest hourly gas prices occur between Saturday and Monday. During Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as Friday and Saturday night the prices spike tremendously.
Now let us have a look at the price differences at various hours of the day. Could it be useful to submit transactions only on certain hours? For this analysis we created a chart for the hourly gas prices for the past four weeks. Let’s see if we can spot hourly patterns:

*Image: Hourly Gas Price for the last month. Click to enlarge.*

There are patterns visible for daily gas price differences. We observe peaks in the gas price every day between 7.00 and 11.00 am UTC. The gas price peak of fast transfers is higher than the peaks of slow and standard transfers. But we can actually see that transactions early in the morning are more expensive than transactions later in the day. The most inexpensive way to issue a transaction is executing it between 9.00 and 12.00 pm UTC. We can clearly see this pattern for the past four weeks.

Per Minute Gas Price

Now let’s move on to the third chart in this blog article. In this chart we analyze the per minute gas price. We can observe the percentiles for a slow (30.0 Percentile), standard (60.0 Percentile) and fast (90.0 Percentile) transfer, highlighted in blue, red and green. We plotted the per minute prices for a timespan of one day.

Are there any intra day patterns visible? Can we see the same early hours pattern as in the hourly past day chart?

*Image: Minute Gas Price for the last day. Click to enlarge.*

Again we can observe that the gas price spikes in the early morning hours. Furthermore we see that the lowest gas price occurs between 9:00 and 12:00 pm UTC. If the transaction does not have to be carried out quickly, it is better to aim for 60%, because this value fluctuates less. And if there are surprisingly high prices, you can simply wait an hour, because they are probably much lower then. Noteworthy the per minute price spiked a few times during the day, once even beyond 500 gwei.

Findings of Ethereum Gas Price Analytics

Let’s quickly summarize what we observed from the daily, hourly and per minute charts. We would like to emphasize that these findings can’t be generalized. The gas price depends upon many factors and releases of new tokens or black swan events might, or rather most likely will, destroy these patterns.

Large scale events will drive gas prices up (token releases, black swan events…).
There is evidence towards higher gas prices. This might be related to the general adoption of Ethereum for DeFi.
Gas prices are higher on weekdays than on weekends.
Transactions are more expensive in the morning than in the evening or night. The gas price spikes daily between 5.00 and 11.00 am UTC.

Methods used in Gas Price Analytics

Now we explore the required queries and code for this blog article. This will not be an introduction to ElasticSearch, Python or Pandas. Therefore we will not cover every code snippet and explain every detail.
For the aforementioned use-cases it is necessary to query the Ethereum Mainnet index. The ElasticSearch host address therefore is:

https://api.anyblock.tools/ethereum/ethereum/mainnet/es/

Fetching the daily percentiles of the gas price for the past two years is as easy as:

# Initialize the ElasticSearch Client
def initialize_elastic(network):
    
    es = Elasticsearch(hosts=[network],
                   http_auth=('EMAIL/USERNAME',
                              'APIKEY'),
                               timeout=180)
    return esnetwork = 'https://api.anyblock.tools/ethereum/ethereum/mainnet/es/# define a function to fetch daily percentiles for the past 2 yearsdef fetch_gas_day(network):
    es = initialize_elastic(network)
    return es.search(
    index = 'tx',
    doc_type = 'tx',
    search_type = 'scan',
    body = {
        "_source":["timestamp","gasPrice.num"],
        "query": {
        "bool": {
            "must": [{                "range":{
                    "timestamp": {
                        "gte": "now-2y"
                    }
                }}            ]
        }
        },
        "aggs": {
        "hour_bucket": {
            "date_histogram": {
                "field": "timestamp",
                "interval": "1d",
                "format": "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss"
            },
            "aggs": {
                "avgGasDay": {
                    "avg": {
                        "field": "gasPrice.num"
                    }
                },
                "percentilesDay": {
                    "percentiles": {
                    "field": "gasPrice.num",
                    "percents": [35,60,90,100]
                }}
            }
        }
    }, "size":0
        })

This query returns the timestamp and the aggregation (the percentiles for a slow, standard, fast and instant transfer).

Changing this query for hourly aggregations is as easy as changing the "interval": "1d" to "interval": "1H" and the timestamp range to "gte": "now-7d".

The same logic applies to the aggregation of minutes, as you see, changing the intervals is as easy as changing a few values.

If you are interested in inspecting the entire code for this blog article, please look here. The code shows the entire process of fetching the data, preprocessing it and plotting the results.

Conclusion

Thanks for taking the time to read this article. I hope that you could get some interesting insights in Ethereum gas prices. In this article we learned to work with the Anyblock API, got some insights into the gas price trends and patterns and acquired some knowledge about the best point in time to issue a transaction.
With the Anyblock API it is easy to fetch blockchain data to do analytics, create charts and get insights into different blockchain networks. I recommend checking out our API documentation, our gas price API endpoint, our block explorer as well as our blockchain dashboards.