On-chain Peak Shaving
Irene Aldridge, Gavhar Annaeva, Leyla Beriker, Zhiheng Cai, Samyak Choudhary, Camila Godoy, Kaicheng Gong, Zitao Huang, Jonah Ji, Hetvi Kharvasiya, Heng Li, Yuxuan Li, Tianchi Ma, Qingcheng Meng, Ruiyang Shi, Ananya Shrivastava, Jiaqi Wang, Yifan Wang, Zihua Wu, Jiayang Xu

TL;DR
This paper investigates on-chain peak shaving in Ethereum, analyzing transaction scheduling to reduce gas fees, and introduces an operational framework based on transaction deferrability and gas intensity.
Contribution
It provides the first empirical analysis of transaction scheduling behavior and formalizes an On-Chain Scheduling Matrix for fee reduction strategies.
Findings
Gas fees peak at 10 AM Eastern Time, driven mainly by speculative demand.
Heterogeneous firm responses to congestion are explained by deferrability and gas intensity.
The On-Chain Scheduling Matrix predicts fee savings of 40-92%.
Abstract
Blockchain technology is widely expected to reduce transaction costs by automating contract enforcement and eliminating intermediaries; yet, the execution costs imposed by network congestion have received little attention in the operations management literature. We study on-chain peak shaving, the systematic scheduling of Ethereum transactions toward low-congestion windows to reduce gas fee exposure. We use transaction-level data from seven firms across seven industries (N = 62,142 transactions, January-March 2026). Gas fees vary significantly throughout the day: the peak-hour premium at 10 AM Eastern Time reaches USD 0.220 per transaction above the overnight baseline, driven primarily by speculative-arbitrage demand rather than operational activity. Firm-level scheduling responses are heterogeneous and not uniformly disciplined. Only three of seven firms transact disproportionately…
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