How Come BSC Gas Fees Are Going Up?

BSC gas fees are going up as a result of increased transactions and unique addresses on the BNB Chain. Its high scalability, block time, and consensus mechanism keep gas prices below $0.30 most of the time. You can use BSCscan and Gwei calculators to know when gas fees are going up.

What Are BSC Gas Fees?

Simply put, BSC gas fees are the cost of using the Binance blockchain. We pay gas fees when sending crypto, staking, or using decentralized applications (dApps). Dapps use autonomous programs called smart contracts that need gas fees to execute.

Because of these fees, users can safely and quickly:

• Swap hundreds of tokens on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) within seconds
• Create or trade NFTs on BNB marketplaces
• Use DeFi services to earn interest while holding crypto
• Use bridge dApps to transfer tokens among BNB and other chains
• Manage decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)
• Protect cryptocurrency with multi-signature wallets
• Create dApp extensions from other ecosystems like Ethereum (ERC-20) to Binance Chain (BEP-20)

For context:

• BSC stands for Binance Smart Chain. It’s the original, outdated name of the blockchain. It rebranded to Binance Chain (BNB Chain).
• While Binance is a centralized, regulated company, BNB Chain is a public blockchain. By definition, it’s decentralized and permissionless (in theory).
• BNB Chain started as a hard fork of Ethereum with a centralized validator set. This means it’s EVM-compatible (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and ERC-20 projects can easily migrate to BEP-20. Many developers do because its centralization achieves far better fees and speed.

BNB Chain gas fees start between $0.20 and $0.30. They scale with the coin price of BNB and your order volume. These have nothing to do with the fees you would pay on the Binance exchange.

What Affects BSC Gas Fees?

Unlike Ether, BSC gas fees are consistently low for several months. Still, there’s been times they jumped from $0.20 to $0.50, which adds up quickly for arbitrage traders. They once crossed $1 last year, but will it happen again? Watch these factors:

Network Congestion

Network congestion occurs when traders overload the blockchain. Validators suddenly have to manage more transactions, which is profitable but not sustainable. Thus, gas fees increase and crypto transaction speeds slow down.

Note that the block time of the BNB Chain is still the same. Validators can choose to ignore small transactions and instead verify users that paid higher fees. It’s a “bidding” feature that BNB Chain inherited from Ethereum.

To speed up a transaction is to pay more gas and make it a bigger priority for validators. If there’s too much demand, you can overpay and still wait for hours for your transaction to clear. Canceling transactions doesn’t refund network costs.

Expect network congestion when bull markets start or whenever BNB rallies. Still, it won’t be as expensive as Ethereum’s fees.

Centralization

The shortest road to scalability is through centralization. How is BNB Chain 10X times cheaper than Ethereum? A better question might be: why does BNB use 21 validators and Ethereum 200,000+?

Ethereum could have lowered fees a long time ago by centralizing the validation. Instead, it chose to protect what matters the most in cryptocurrencies: decentralized security. This alternative involves more infrastructure work, such as building sidechains, Layer-2 solutions, or data shards.

It’s not that the same 21 people run BNB Chain. “Anyone” can become a validator if you meet the minimums, which are 10,000 BNB staked, 128GB of RAM, and other hardware specs. But to actually validate blocks, you have to be one of the 21 validators with the most tokens staked.

Presumably, many of those belong to Binance (company). A 100-validator minimum would be more plausible. With only 21, it’s hard not to associate Binance with the blockchain.

Think about it. If the Binance exchange suddenly shuts down or disappears, what would happen to the BNB Chain?

To complicate further, the BNB coin is linked to both, which will impact gas fees.

Block Time

Block time is associated with transaction speed, size, confirmations, and network volume. It’s the time it takes for validators to create a new block. In proof-of-work blockchains, block time is how long it takes to mine a new coin (e.g., the block time of Bitcoin is 10 minutes).

It depends on the number of validators online and network demand, so there’s no fixed time. Instead, there’s an average block time and expected block time (the longest it should take). When the average exceeds the expected time, the mechanism reduces it (by increasing hash difficulty on Bitcoin or reducing stake rewards on Ethereum).

The BNB block time is 3 seconds, the same as PulseChain’s, and 4x faster than Ethereum. BNB also has a 32KB block size compared to Ethereum’s 80KB. When reducing block time, transactions are faster but users save fewer fees.

Consensus Mechanism

The consensus mechanism of a blockchain is the rules it follows to function without intervention. It sets the way of verifying blocks and choosing validators. BNB Chain uses a hybrid between proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof-of-authority (PoA) called Proof Of Stake Authority (PoSA):

• Validators need to verify their identity
• Nodes choose validators based on their reputation protecting the network
• Every day, the consensus mechanism selects the 21 nodes (out of thousands) with the most BNB to validate blocks

It’s a centralized model that works great on private blockchains. On public ones, not so much. Any security threat to Binance will affect the coin and network fees.

BSC Gas Fees Calculator

BSC gas fees can be very confusing. If you look them up, instead you’ll find prices in Gwei (gas units). 1 Gwei costs 0.000000001 BNB, different transactions cost 5-10 Gwei on BSC, and you never know how many gas units you need (the default is 21,000, but it could be a ~200,000 limit).

That’s the first reason there are no BSC gas fee calculators. The second one is all transaction fees are fixed regardless of your volume. All you need to pay is what appears in this chart ($0.22 at the time of writing, or 0.00088 BNB rounded to 0.001).

You can watch these BSC statistics to calculate it yourself:

• Average fee ($) = BNB price ($) * Average transaction fee (BNB)
• Average transaction fee (BNB) = Total daily transaction fees (BNB) / Total daily transactions

The default gas settings on Metamask should result in the same Average fee (so you don’t have to calculate Gweis).