Fees and Gas

Transactions consume gas, and the sender must pay a fee in order for the transaction be processed by the validator nodes. The fee is calculated from the amount of gas a Tx will consume multiplied by the gas price.

NOTE

The gas price for a transaction is set by the sender of the Tx, but each validator will have set their own minimum-gas-prices value, and will not process transactions that do not meet this minimum requirement.

Fees are paid in nund, and may be either set or calculated depending on which flags are passed to the und command.

NOTE

only --fees or --gas-prices may be used - not both at the same time.

TIP

--gas-prices can be used along with the --gas=auto and --gas-adjustment flags to estimate the gas requirement and automatically calculate the Tx fees.

Example 1: setting --fees

In this example, we're manually setting the fee for a standard send transaction. The validator has a minimum-gas-prices of 25.0nund. We'll set the --fee to 2000000nund. For the purposes of simpler calculations, we'll assume the amount of gas consumed for this send transaction, including a small --memo will be around 65000.

NOTE

gas is defined on the chain as a flat cost per byte for a Tx, e.g. 10 gas per byte. The total size of our Tx will be around 6500 bytes, and therefore the gas consumed by the Tx will be 6500 * 10 = 65000.

und tx send [from] [to] 123456nund --memo="some und from me to you" --fees=2000000nund

In this instance, the gas-price is implied as approximately 30.77nund (fee / gas: 2000000 / 65000), so the Validator will accept the Tx and include it in the block, since 30.77nund > 25.0nund.

If we had set the --fees to 1000000, it would not have been processed by the Validator (1000000 / 65000 = 15.38nund).

NOTE

the Tx with lower fees may remain the Tx pool until a validator with lower minimum-gas-prices picks it up and proposes the block.

Example 2: setting --gas and --gas-prices

In this example, we'll set our own --gas-prices, and ask und to estimate the amount of gas the Tx will consume based on the Tx input by passing the --gas=auto flag. We can also use the --gas-adjustment flag to increase/decrease this gas estimate. We'll assume again that the calculated estimate will be around 65000 gas:

und tx send from to 123456nund --memo="some und from me to you" --gas=auto --gas-prices=25.0nund

In this example, the Tx fee will be calculated and included in the transaction for us. The fee will be around 1625000nund (gas * gas-prices: 65000 * 25.0). Since we have set gas-prices already to 25.0 (and assuming the gas estimate is also correct), this Tx will be processed by the validator.

NOTE

Adding the --gas-adjustment flag, for example --gas-adjustment=1.5, will increase the gas estimate and therefore the fee, but will increase the chances of the Tx being processed.

Validators will prioritise Txs with higher gas-prices, so it is worth setting higher prices to ensure your Tx is processed.