Thread by @thatguyintech

💰 LET'S TALK MONEY 💰

if you're jumping into web3 dev right now for the first time and exploring @solidity_lang, @ethereum smart contracts, and making NFTs...

1) welcome ❤️ you're in for one heck of a ride 🥳

2) MAKE SURE YOU KNOW HOW GAS AND TX FEES WORK 💸💸

Back in the day, deployment for building DApps was relatively affordable.

🙋🏻‍♂️ CryptoPunks was deployed in 2017 for $7.56
🐕 $SHIB was deployed in July 2020 for $60

Sources:
- etherscan.io/tx/0x0885b9e51…
- etherscan.io/tx/0x0a4022e61…

Today, those exact same contracts would cost an arm and a leg to deploy 💀💀💀

🙋🏻‍♂️ CryptoPunks would cost $964
🐕 $SHIB would cost $2,026

It costs 30x to 120x more dollars to deploy contracts to @ethereum today compared to a few years ago.

...WHY?

There are three things that ultimately affect your deploy costs:

1) # of UNITs of gas used in the deploy tx
2) the PRICE per unit of gas based on current traffic
3) the fiat VALUE of $ETH

and the formula is:

TOTAL COST = UNITS * PRICE * VALUE

Let's look at the @cryptopunksbot contract deployment from 2017 as an example:

UNITS = 2,142,276 gas
PRICE = 0.000000011 $ETH per gas
VALUE = $320.97 per $ETH

TOTAL COST = 2,142,276 * 0.000000011 * 320.97

TOTAL COST = $7.56

So what changed for the @cryptopunksbot contract between 2017 and 2021?

🟢UNITS of gas stayed the same
🔴PRICE per gas increased due to high traffic
🔴VALUE per $ETH has increased because 🚀🌕

average gas PRICE is 100-150 gwei these days
average $ETH value is $4,000 USD

Why are people still building on Ethereum if it's so expensive? Well, currently..

1) it's the most secure smart contract platform
2) it has the best developer ecosystem and tooling
3) it has the biggest market

this DOES NOT MEAN that it's the best tool for your project

Maybe you just want to learn, and build an end to end project just to see what it's like.

Maybe you're targeting a very specific use case that prioritizes speed and cost over decentralization.

There are lots of reasons you may want to explore alternatives.

So what are the alternatives?

If you want to stay within the Ethereum ecosystem, check out sidechains and L2s:

- @0xPolygon (has a growing NFT user base)
- @Immutable
- @optimismPBC
- @arbitrum
- @zksync

If you want to explore different blockchains with different programming languages, different system architectures:

- @solana
- @avalancheavax
- @tezos
- @Polkadot

Instead of switching platforms, you can also look into optimizing your solidity code to reduce unnecessary logic.

( Because the purpose of gas to begin with is to pay miners for running the logic of your program! So complex logic = more gas )

medium.com/@kaymonft/opti…

So that was a quick overview of how to think about gas fees when deploying your own projects.

If you found this thread useful, drop a comment and let me know if you'd also like a tutorial for how to deploy and measure gas costs while you're coding!

Happy Web3-ing :)