Gas Fees in Gno.land

This document explains how gas works in the Gno.land ecosystem, including gas pricing, estimation, and optimization.

What is Gas?

Gas is a measure of computational and storage resources required to execute operations on the blockchain. Every transaction on Gno.land consumes gas based on:

1. The complexity of the operation being performed
2. The amount of data being stored
3. The current network conditions

Gas serves several important purposes:

• Prevents spam and denial-of-service attacks
• Allocates network resources fairly among users
• Compensates validators for the computational resources they provide

Gas Parameters

When submitting transactions to Gno.land, you need to specify two gas-related parameters:

Gas Wanted

--gas-wanted specifies the maximum amount of gas your transaction is allowed to consume. If your transaction requires more gas than this limit, it will fail with an "out of gas" error, but will still consume the gas up to that point.

Gas Fee

--gas-fee specifies how much you're willing to pay per unit of gas. This is typically expressed in ugnot (micro-GNOT). For example, 1000000ugnot means you're willing to pay 1 GNOT per unit of gas.

The total maximum fee you might pay is calculated as:

Maximum Fee = Gas Wanted × Gas Fee

You will be charged the gas fee you specified.

Typical Gas Values

Here are some recommended gas values for common operations:

Operation	Recommended Gas Wanted	Typical Gas Fee
Simple transfer	100,000	1000000ugnot
Calling a realm function	2,000,000	1000000ugnot
Deploying a small package	5,000,000	1000000ugnot
Deploying a complex realm	10,000,000+	1000000ugnot

These values may vary based on network conditions and the specific implementation of your code.

Gas Estimation

Use the -simulate only flag to simulate a transaction without executing it on-chain. This allows you to estimate gas usage and fees without incurring any cost or incrementing the account sequence number.

gnokey maketx addpkg \
  -pkgdir "./hello" \
  -pkgpath gno.land/r/hello \
  -gas-wanted 2000000 \
  -gas-fee 1000000ugnot \
  -remote https://rpc.gno.land:443 \
  -broadcast \
  -chainid staging \
  -simulate only \
  YOUR_KEY_NAME

You will see output similar to the following:

GAS WANTED: 2000000
GAS USED:   268994
INFO:       estimated gas usage: 268994, gas fee: 282ugnot, current gas price: 1ugnot/1000gas

You can then use the estimated gas as the -gas-wanted and -gas-fee values in your actual transaction.

Example Transaction with Gas Parameters

Here's an example of sending a transaction with gas parameters:

gnokey maketx call \
  -pkgpath "gno.land/r/demo/boards" \
  -func "CreateBoard" \
  -args "MyBoard" \
  -args "Board description" \
  -gas-fee 1000000ugnot \
  -gas-wanted 2000000 \
  -remote https://rpc.gno.land:443 \
  -chainid staging \
  YOUR_KEY_NAME

Gas Optimization Tips

To minimize gas costs, consider these optimization strategies:

1. Minimize on-chain storage: Only store essential data on-chain
2. Batch operations: Combine multiple operations into a single transaction when possible
3. Use efficient data structures: Well-optimized code consumes less gas
4. Precompute values off-chain: Do as much computation as possible before submitting to the blockchain
5. Test locally first: Use gnodev to test and optimize your code before deploying to a network