[IDEA] Revert the earlier increase in gas price

General
1

Summary

Reduce the gas price back to 0.01 utrn per gas unit. (1 untrn is 0.000001 NTRN)

Details

For background: unlike Ethereum whose gas price is determined by an onchain mechanism, the gas price of a Cosmos chain, such as Neutron, is set individually by each node as an offchain parameter. Typically, the chain’s dev team sets a “recommended” gas price and publicize it in the chain-registry repository.

On October 20, a pull request (PR) was merged into chain-registry which increased Neutron’s gas price from 0.01 untrn per gas to 0.50 untrn per gas:

https:// github .com/cosmos/chain-registry/pull/3005

Last week, on December 15, a further increase to 0.56 was made:

https:// github .com/cosmos/chain-registry/pull/3444

4 days ago, on December 19, this change was mirrored to Keplr’s wallet, effectuating it for all Keplr users:

https:// github .com/chainapsis/keplr-chain-registry/pull/326

Overall, this is a massive 56x increase in gas price.

To the best of my knowledge, the community has not been consulted before this change was made.

In my opinion, the current gas price on Neutron is excessively high. See the following table comparing it to popular Cosmos chains and Ethereum L2s:

Neutron Osmosis Optimism Arbitrum
Send native token $0.18 $0.000618 $0.07 $0.11
Swap tokens $0.29 $0.0148 $0.14 $0.31
TPS 0.22 2.46 6.05 13.47

Gas price data from l2fees.info or simulation by Keplr wallet on Astroport and Osmosis frontends. TPS data from MintScan, Arbiscan, and Optimism explorer.

For more complex token swaps that involves route splitting, the gas fee can be well over $1 (try swapping Astropepe→ETH for example).

As shown in the above table, Neutron is more expensive than competitors, while doing 10x less TPS.

I suggest reverting the earlier increase in gas price, setting it back to 0.01 untrn per gas unit.

5 Likes
2

Seen several users complain already about txs failing. I’m very supportive of higher gas fees in general, but maybe we can increase it little by little until volume picks up.

3 Likes
3

Changing it on the chain registry won’t do much as validators are taking it from config files I think.

The problem I see is here.

In the comment it says TXes should not cost more than 5c but they are hardcoding it to 0.2 USDC? Either the comment is wrong or the code is wrong.

I think 20c for a TX is a bit too much as well like you can see from Larry’s comparison.

4 Likes
4

Hey @larry and @mky the proposal to modify the minimum gas price to 0.075 went live recently and should be executed on the 8th.

https://governance.neutron.org/proposals/27

4 Likes
5

This is great, thanks for the update.

3 Likes