Yesterday, I had seen on Twitter that Metamask had rolled out support for EIP-1559 transactions! This would give the user a touch more control in setting the transaction fees on Ethereum in addition to contributing to the constant deflationary pressure of ETH via the base fee burn. All very useful network enhancements!

... But actually, I just wanted to give it all a bit of a spin, like any new shiny toy! So, after my travels... I had a few hours to kill whilst waiting for the first rehearsal, and just by luck, it happened to be a moment of tolerable gas fees. They were sitting in the high teens through to the low twenties.

Well, seeing as I had a transaction that has been sitting around for the last couple of weeks I figured that I may as well override it and submit a new batch of transactions for a few things that I have been waiting to do.

This particular transaction that has gotten stuck (uncompetitive gas fee) was the last of a batch of transactions that I had done pre-1559. It was a shift of tokens from Ethereum mainnet to xdai. I had unfortunately gotten steamrollered by the tidal wave of 10k limited run Nfts. Man, I will be glad when that particular craze is dead and buried...

The most annoying thing about the NFT minting craze was that it didn't really die down and let fees relax over the weekends or evenings. Those are the times that I normally try to push through the transactions that are not time critical.

So, even if one of my transactions would have uncompetitive fees for the high network usage times during the week, it would often be included in a block at some point within the week or two. However, my pre-1559 transaction (the xDAI Omnibridge) was just nowhere close to the mark at 14 gwei. Plus, I was starting to read about how the mixed pool of pre and post 1559 transactions were being sorted for block inclusion.. and it turns out that pre-1559 blocks were being regarded as having 0 effective tip for the miner, and thus being even less competitive!

At the time, I figured I could just wait out the NFT storm. After all, I didn't have anything pressing that I needed to do on the mainnet anyway. However, as the weeks passed, I started to list up a couple of things that actually needed doing a bit sooner rather than later. Again nothing pressing, but the amount of ETH that I HAD bridged over to Optimism to handle Synthetix and Uniswap over there was starting to dry up. Optimism is cheap, but it isn't free! So, I would need to either start unstaking and selling some SNX on Optimism... or get some ETH/SNX over the bridge from mainnet to OE.... but that would mean that I would need to get my wallet working again!

So, the low fee period of around 15-25 gwei was a good moment to make a start on this! So, this unsticking transaction would be just the same bridging transaction on Omnibridge to go from ETH to xDAI, with the same nonce... but a proper competitive (for now) bid for the gas fees. So, the low, medium, high options are still there for the people who don't want mess around with the finer settings of transaction tweaks. They still work fine, but I wanted to have a look at the two new additions....

Max fee and max priority fee are the the new tweaks that came in with London. Basically, they are what they say on the label. The maximum amount that you want to pay (with the potential for a refund if the actual costs are lower) and the priority fee that goes in as a tip for the miner (not burnt). Most things that day were going through with 0 or 1 gwei tips, so I did end up tweaking that down and I also revised the max fee down a little bit as well. Remember, these are the prices per unit of gas and not the total!

Ahhhhhh... the transaction went through quickly and smoothly, overriding this old transaction! There is nothing more beautiful than seeing that Dropped and Replaced status! It really beats seeing Pending... for weeks!

... and with that first 1559 transaction done, I started on my shopping list of other transactions that I wanted to get through. Fees were still on the low side, so I figured I may as well do a handful of them right away. The most critical one was a bridge of SNX to Optimism so that I could sell a bit to ETH in order to fund the transactions over there and stake the rest on the layer 2. I feel like I breath a sigh of relief there... I was starting to really count every transaction that I was going to be able to make before I ran out of ETH for gas... and seeing if I would either need to pay sky-high mainnet fees to bridge over, or hope that I had enough gas to unstake and sell some L2 SNX!

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