Anyone who has used Ethereum in 2020 knows the frustration of paying for gas, the measure that represents a transaction's computational weight. With gas prices sometimes ascent upwardly to 100 to 200 gwei, a unit equal to one billionth of an Ether (ETH), many users are finding themselves priced out of the action.

While just a wide adoption of layer-two scaling solutions and the inflow of sharding can truly fix the situation, a few tricks can however aid relieve some coin when using the blockchain.

The easiest trick is simply avoiding making transactions during certain times of the 24-hour interval. New enquiry from Flipside Crypto shows that the Ethereum blockchain shows quite specific patterns of congestion that a savvy user can exploit to pay less in gas.

Boilerplate Ethereum hourly fees, courtesy of Flipside Crypto

The analysts sampled average fees on Ethereum starting from Jan. i, 2020. The bars stand for a median where most of the data points are located, while dots represent outliers.

The nautical chart shows that, on average, the Ethereum blockchain is busiest from 1 PM UTC to about 6 PM UTC, respective approximately to the early U.Southward. trading session between eight AM EST and i PM EST. This is likely no coincidence, as during this fourth dimension window both Europe and the U.Southward. are fully awake and at piece of work.

By contrast, the to the lowest degree decorated flow is between 9 PM UTC and eleven PM UTC. This too makes sense — The U.S. workday is coming to a close, Europe is getting gear up to sleep, while in Asia it is still very early on in the morning. In addition to lower boilerplate values, the evening UTC period too sees fewer outliers.

The information is useful to wait out periods of high activity, or to send a lower fee transaction with the confidence of knowing it will be confirmed in a few hours. The latter trick is only useful for low-priority transactions like token transfers, while it is discouraged for certain DeFi protocols.

Most notably, decentralized exchanges are usually a poor target for low-priority transactions. Slippage protection settings could mean that past the fourth dimension the transaction is confirmed, the cost has naturally moved from the initial betoken and the transaction fails — completely wasting precious gas. Some DeFi protocols also accept internal checks to decline transactions older than a few minutes.

Across simply waiting, some situational tricks can too aid vastly decrease the toll of gas. The Chi Gas Token, for example, lowers the full gas consumed by a item transaction. The token acts as a discount storage mechanism — users should mint Chi when gas is cheap and use it when fees ascension. Chi tin can also be purchased like any other token.

Depending on the user'south needs, certain solutions may help completely avoid high gas costs. Several layer-2 solutions similar Zk Sync, OMG'southward Plasma or xDai offload transactions to another ledger, allowing most gratuitous token transfers later on an initial setup cost. For trading, Loopring and DeversiFi offer non-custodial trading with essentially zero gas fees.

Such alternative platforms are seeing lower adoption and may non be suitable for anybody, but they are likewise the only realistic pathway towards reducing congestion once and for all.