Understanding Gas Fees and How Tetreum Minimizes Them

Gas fees are the invisible tax that determines whether a blockchain is practically usable. On Ethereum, a simple token transfer can cost $5-50 during peak times. On Tetreum, the same transaction costs less than $0.001. Here's why that difference matters — and how Tetreum achieves it.

What Is Gas?

Gas is a unit of computational work. Every EVM operation — reading storage, writing to state, performing arithmetic, calling another contract — costs a fixed amount of gas. Total transaction fee = Gas Used × Gas Price. The gas used is fixed per operation; the gas price is what varies.

Why Ethereum Gas Fees Get So High

Ethereum has a fixed block gas limit. During high demand, there are more transactions wanting to fit into blocks than can fit. This creates an auction: users bid up gas prices to get their transaction included first. During NFT mints or DeFi events, gas prices can spike 100x above normal.

How Tetreum Achieves Sub-Cent Fees

• Parallel transaction processing means 100x more throughput per block
• Higher throughput means block space is abundant, not scarce
• Abundant block space means no gas price auctions
• POA consensus eliminates miner MEV extraction
• Fixed, predictable gas prices rather than volatile market auctions

Typical Tetreum transaction cost:
- Simple TET transfer:    ~0.00001 TET ($0.000034)
- ERC-20 token transfer:  ~0.00003 TET ($0.0001)
- Complex DeFi operation: ~0.0001  TET ($0.00034)
- Contract deployment:    ~0.001   TET ($0.0034)

"When a transaction costs $0.0001, entirely new categories of applications become possible. Micropayments, in-game economies, IoT data feeds — none of these work at $5 per transaction." — Protocol Team