6 Top Ways To Save Gas Fees While Buying NFTs

Ethreum gas fees are the fees that anyone making transactions on the Ethereum blockchain pays to have their transactions confirmed by the miners on the network. These fees are paid to the miners that confirm the transactions and they can be quite high on the network.

The reason why ETH gas fees are high is because there are a lot of activities that go on on the network. These activities result in high traffic which has the consequence of making the demand for the miners’ services to rise.

With the high demand comes high prices. This is why there could be very high fees that some people are not willing to pay on the network if they can get a similar service on another blockchain.

It is not surprising that the gas fees that the miners charge to confirm and validate transactions is much higher than what you have in most other networks. Ethereum is the most popular blockchain for minting NFTs. It is also the host to most De-Fi and Web 3 projects. All these contribute to the immensely high fees.

So how can a user such as an NFT buyer avoid fees that are too high?

Monitor Traffic for Low Gas Demand

Even though the Ethereum network could get clogged most times, there are periods such as weekends when gas fees could fall remarkably. You can actually take advantage of gas trackers.

A gas tracker on sites such as Etherscan would give you an insight into when the demand for the transactions is low. At such periods, you can actually make your NFT transactions and save fees on the Ethereum network.

Some of the data available on the tracker are the average gas fee, the high and the low gas fees. You can also get an idea of what the transaction time would be as well as know what the fees would be, depending on what you want to do on the network and what platform you’ll be minting or operating from on the Ethereum network.

Wait for The Right Time To Buy

There is a right time if the fees are important to you. For instance, there are times that making transactions on the Ethereum network such as buying an NFT would cost you $100 in fees. You could avoid this by waiting when the fees are low if the collectible that you’re planning to buy could wait. Weekends are the best times to do this.

Granted, there may be a hot NFT that you desire and ready to pay for at a premium price, but if you’re in no rush, weekends are the best times for low fees on the Ethereum network. You can also set your gas fees as conveniently low as you can afford, if waiting for hours before receiving your NFT is not an issue.

Use Ethereum Gas Chart

You can also monitor the pattern of the demand or congestion in the Ethereum network by monitoring gas fees on Ethereum gas chart. This enables the user to understand how high and low the gas fees spike and fall within a week.

You can correlate the chart with the different times of the day or week to understand when best to buy your NFT. For example, around midnight, when most people are asleep, gas fees would most likely be very low. This could be a good time to buy an NFT.

Use An Alternative Blockchain To Mint Or Buy NFT

As we already stated earlier, one of the reasons why fees are too high on the Ethereum network is the high demand and the fact that the network has not been scaled to accommodate the high load it bears.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that if you’re buying or minting NFTs that you do not have alternatives. There are competing blockchains that offer quality services at lower fees and even faster transactions such as Solana.

It is important to understudy the NFT platform where you intend to do business to understand how things work. There are platforms that operate on the Ethereum platform while there are others that use other blockchains such as Solana, IOTA, Flow, Tezos and Cardano. You may have to reconsider buying your NFTs from those that need you to fund an Ethereum wallet such as Mintable if you want to avoid the high fees associated with the blockchain.

Furthermore, there are some NFT platforms that give you greater options and flexibility such as Opensea. On this platform, you can make payments using a variety of tokens and therefore not limited to Ethereum and the high fees associated with the transactions of its blockchain.

Mintable is another NFT minting platform where you can buy already minted collectibles with fiat such as USD. The shortfall of this particular platform is that they store the NFTs that you buy, just like keeping your funds in an exchange.

You can also consider the native ecosystem of THETA known as Theta Drop which has its own blockchain and is gaining attention as a platform where videos can be turned to NFTs.

Another option that you should also consider is Solanart, a full NFT platform based on Solana. Solana is a competitor of Ethereum and the fees on the network are much lower and transactions faster.

Use Gas Token

If buying, selling and minting on Ethereum network is a must for you, then consider using Gas Token. This is a platform that allows the user to buy and store up gas for use on the Ethereum network. The stored gas is acquired by the user when gas fees are low and can be deployed for use in transactions when gas fees are high. This can come handy any time the user is in need of lower gas fees on the Ethereum network.

Explore Ethereum’s Layer 2

This may be an option if you’re going to be involved a lot in the NFT or DeFi space and need to have regular transactions that require low fees. Ethereum’s layer 2 or sidechain, just like the Bitcoin LN makes it possible to have low or near zero transaction fees.

However you have to be sure that the NFT platform that you’re using can support such transactions. Also, interoperability-focused platforms such as Polygon’s proof-of-stake network, have scaling solutions that enable the user to access low fees on the Ethereum network. This offers the user the ability to interact with a number of dApps that are based on the Ethereum network cheaply.

These are some ways that you can easily buy NFTs cheaply, especially on the Ethereum network which hosts most of the non-fungible tokens and other decentralized apps in the industry.