Step on the Gas? A Better Approach for Recommending the Ethereum Gas Price

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning-based gas price recommendation system for Ethereum that significantly reduces transaction costs while maintaining timely inclusion, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel predictive model combining deep learning and user urgency to improve gas price recommendations in Ethereum.

Findings

Achieves over 50% cost savings on average.

Incurred only 1.3 block delay on average.

Outperforms existing Ethereum gas price mechanisms.

Abstract

In the Ethereum network, miners are incentivized to include transactions in a block depending on the gas price specified by the sender. The sender of a transaction therefore faces a trade-off between timely inclusion and cost of his transaction. Existing recommendation mechanisms aggregate recent gas price data on a per-block basis to suggest a gas price. We perform an empirical analysis of historic block data to motivate the use of a predictive model for gas price recommendation. Subsequently, we propose a novel mechanism that combines a deep-learning based price forecasting model as well as an algorithm parameterized by a user-specific urgency value to recommend gas prices. In a comprehensive evaluation on real-world data, we show that our approach results on average in costs savings of more than 50% while only incurring an inclusion delay of 1.3 blocks, when compared to the gas price recommendation mechanism of the most widely used Ethereum client.