Ethereum & Layer 2 Gas Fees: Transaction Cost by Chain

What a transaction actually costs right now on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon and BNB Chain — not just a gas price in gwei, but the cost in dollars of the things users actually do: send the native coin, send a token, swap on a DEX, mint an NFT.

Reads public JSON-RPC nodes directly. No API key, no account, no browser.

Modes

• Gas - one row per chain: gas price, base fee, the priority fee at the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile, how full recent blocks are, and the dollar cost of four standard actions.
• Actions - one row per chain per action, ranked cheapest first, with how many times the cheapest chain each one costs.
• History - one row per recent block: base fee and block fullness.

Example output

{
  "mode": "actions",
  "action": "transfer",
  "chain": "Base",
  "isLayer2": true,
  "settlementLayer": "Ethereum",
  "executionCostNative": 0.000000126,
  "l1DataFeeNative": 0.000000005079,
  "totalCostUsd": 0.00025,
  "costRankAmongChains": 2,
  "timesCheapestChainCost": 4.59,
  "l1DataFeeHandling": "L1 data fee priced by the chain own gas oracle and added"
}

The part most gas trackers get wrong

A layer 2's real cost is not its gas price. Base and Optimism charge a cheap execution fee plus a fee for posting your transaction data to Ethereum, and the second part usually dominates. In a live run today, a Base transfer cost $0.00025, of which the execution component was worth about $0.0000002 — quoting the gas price alone understates the true cost by roughly a thousand times.

This actor prices that L1 component through each chain's own on-chain gas oracle and adds it, and every row says which method was used:

• Base and Optimism - L1 data fee read from the gas oracle and included.
• Arbitrum - bills its L1 cost as extra gas units rather than a separate fee, so a standard gas figure does not capture it. The row says so, and reports the execution estimate rather than inventing a number that looks complete.
• Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain - settle their own transactions, so there is nothing extra to add.

Other things worth knowing

• Public RPC nodes answer 403 to a request with no User-Agent. That is a missing header, not a block, and it is the sort of thing that reads as "this endpoint is dead" if you do not check.
• A JSON-RPC error arrives inside an HTTP 200 response, so the status code alone never means success. Every call checks the envelope.
• Each chain has more than one endpoint here and calls rotate through them, so one node rate limiting does not fail the run. The endpoint actually used ships on every row.
• Polygon's token was renamed from MATIC to POL. The old ticker no longer exists on the price venue, so asking for it silently prices the chain at nothing. It is quoted as POL.
• baseFeePerGas returns one more entry than gasUsedRatio — the extra entry is the next block, which has no usage yet. Pairing them by index without allowing for that shifts every reading by one block.
• Gas units are representative, not a quote. A swap is priced at 150,000 gas because that is typical; your specific swap may differ. The assumed figure ships on every actions row so you can substitute your own.
• Where a native token price cannot be fetched, dollar costs are null and native costs are still reported, rather than a chain silently vanishing from the comparison.

Who this is for

• Wallet and dapp developers quoting costs to users, or deciding which chain to deploy on.
• Traders timing transactions around congestion, and anyone comparing bridging destinations by cost.
• Analysts tracking the economics of layer 2s against the chain they settle to.

Pricing

$0.004 per row. The first 2 rows of every run are free, and note rows (an unknown chain, an unknown action, a chain that did not respond) are never charged.

A full snapshot of all six chains is 6 rows, or $0.024. Every action on every chain is 24 rows, or $0.096. This is built to be scheduled: fees move minute to minute, and the interesting readings are the busy ones.

Related actors

• Bitcoin Network Data - the same question for Bitcoin: fees, mempool and difficulty.
• Crypto Order Book Depth - liquidity and slippage across exchanges.

How to run it via API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/scrapemint~gas-fees-by-chain/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"mode":"actions","chains":["ethereum","base","arbitrum"],"actions":["swap"]}'

Fee data from public JSON-RPC nodes. Native token prices from OKX.