Best Tactics When Competing In NFT Gas Wars

I am a huge Ethereum maximalist but it goes without saying that there is one big problem – gas wars. It’s now common place for the gas fees to be more expensive than the NFT you are trying to mint. Kind of fucked up, right? That being said, we have a bunch of nifty tactics you can use to give yourself the best chance of saving your hard earned Eth and coming out on top.

1. Don’t Be Cute With Your Gas Price

The first thing you need to understand is, if you start a mint and try to cut costs by going low on your gas – you will be disappointed. As every second passes, more and more people will be inputting transactions attempting to mint. As this happens, the GWEI required to be successful is going to increase. If you go a little higher than average on your first mint attempt then you’ll have a chance of minting before the rush. Yes, you may pay more in that given time, but 30 seconds later the gas fee could well be a lot higher – and usually is.

2. Mint From The Contract

You’ve probably heard this banded around a lot. The premise of why I am suggesting you do this is simple. You can get in there first as soon as the minting begins. Let me explain. When the project developers decide to set the minting live, they have to push a transaction through. Once that has gone through, they’ll usually enable a minting button on the website. Most people are sat twiddling their thumbs refreshing the website.

But you don’t need to do that.

Simply load up etherscan and watch the transactions. As soon as you see the ‘start mint’ or ‘unpause’ transaction go through, you know the contract is live. Now you can go mint directly on the contract and pay a relatively low gas fee since only a handful of experienced minters will be using this method.

3. Check What GWEI Is Working

There is nothing worse than whacking up your GWEI only to sit there seeing the mint numbers trickling away whilst you are still pending. If you are in the middle of the minting period, head onto the contract via etherscan. You can then take a look at a list of the successful transactions and see what GWEI they used.

Remember, if you have a stuck transaction, you may need to cancel this before attempting again at higher GWEI.

4. Cancel Your Transaction If It’s Getting Tight

A part of winning gas wars, is conservation. If you are approaching the end of the mint and are worried your transaction won’t go through then you want to cancel your transaction. The reason you do this is because then you’ll only lose a small amount of Eth with the cancellation transaction. If you just let it ride, you could end up losing the entire gas fee. One important factor when doing this is to ensure you notch up your GWEI super high. This ensures your cancellation gets through fast and it really doesn’t cost that much since it is a simple task for the Ethereum network to complete.

Get Minting

That’s it, now you have some knowledge in the bank that will help you in your next mint. But, practice is also important, the more mints you go into, the easier this will all come and you’ll do it all without thinking. I’d advise to test things out with single mints to start with until you are familiar with everything. After that, you might feel more safe whaling in to projects you are feeling good about.