So, if you've read all my other posts about DeFi and intro to DeFis, you'll realize I've been FUD-ing pretty hard about the cost of gas fees.

And I will not stop either. The irony, ethereum is a victim of its own success. So many projects hopped on the same network, they crippled it. And now I see more and more projects are migrating to other blockchains, which are designed with congestion fail safes in place.

So, quick review, every Ethereum transaction has gas fees. The two units which determine the entire cost of the TX are gwei and gas limit. Gwei being the unit being spent, and gas limit being the limit of the spent units themselves.

As we mentioned before, a bare bones basic transactions of sending X ethereum to another wall on the network will have a 21,000 gas limit, TIMES the current gwei price.

For more sophisticated TX like interactions with smart contracts (that's right I'm looking at your ENS domains), it can cost up to 310,000 gas limit.

All said and done, at present day prices, a basic TX will run you $5- 8. More complex TXs can run between $80 to 120. Easily.

Now that we know, how Ethereum TX's work, and how to calculate the costs, let's switch over to one of my favorite chains at the moment.

TRON is also a decentralized chain. And for Dapps, it has the scalability to handle large TXs without having fees sky rocket due to network overload (assuming the community does not vote to increase fees, more on this later).

Remember how Ethereum had two units? gwei and gas limit? well Tron has something similar but wildly different.

Energy and bandwidth. And while I'm still learning the nuances of both units, I can say energy is closer to gwei, and bandwidth to gas limit.

We'll build on this later, but for any transaction on Tron's blockchain, you can EITHER pay in energy AND bandwidth combined. OR with Tron itself.

So what does this mean? Energy and bandwidth are not measured in Tron units like Ethereum? that is correct.

IF you have enough energy and bandwidth to conduct any TX, even with a smart contract, the TX is "free." No TRON will be used.

Before I go into the details of what "free" mean, let's jump into how you can get bandwidth and energy to conduct "free" transactions on Tron.

When you send Tron to you wallet, and you've connected some wallet extension like TronLink (Metamask equivalent for Tron, same set up, same chromium based browser extension) you'll see a button that says "freeze / unfreeze."

When you "freeze" your Tron, you are unable to use it. Let me repeat, WHEN YOU FREEZE X AMOUNT OF TRON, you are unable to use it. It is essentially "staked." So for freezing X amount of Tron, you are awarded X amount of energy. The higher the amount of Tron you freeze, the more energy you have to spend. Now let's say you go to justswap.network (which is the UniSwap equivalent on Tron) and you want to exchange some Tron for some CYFM (currently one of my favorite Tron/ ETH projects). When you click "swap" the very same process takes place like on ethereum. You authorize the token being swapped, and you approve the swap. Each one has a separate "energy + bandwidth" fee. 

Two critical components to point out. #1) Your energy refills over time. (I do not have the exact formula, but for me, it takes about 13-16 hours to refill 100K worth of energy) and so does bandwidth. Bandwidth is set at 5,000 bandwidth every 24 hours. Both these expenditure units refill over time.

So what does that translate to? Well, from day one when I started using the Tron network, I've frozen about 3-4K worth of tron and i haven't paid a dollar in TX fees. For TX's which required multiple energy expensive steps (basically a TX which, lets say approving a token for swap costs 100K energy, and another 100K for the swap) I just simply spaced out the intervals between the TX's.

Another important factor - I have NEVER had a deficit of bandwidth yet. Perhaps I haven't been doing as many TXs as others, but so far. The 5000 bandwidth I'm allocated every 24 hours is plenty.

Other things to consider. Whilst your Tron is frozen, you're given some voting credits. If you click on the "vote" tab inside Tronlink, you can delegate your votes to Super Representatives and get rewards in Tron, relative to the amount of Tron you've frozen, and as long as its frozen.

My own experience is netting me just over 1 tron every 2.5 days at 3-4K worth of Tron frozen.

The Tron you freeze - the minimum duration is 3 days. Meaning, if you're freezing X amount of Tron, you can only Unfreeze to transfer, use, etc, the earliest after 72 hours.

Your Tron will not unfreeze by itself. To unfreeze Tron, you simply click the "freeze/ unfreeze" button, select the reason you froze the Tron (you can freeze for more bandwidth or energy, or both). You select the option which you froze the tron for, and click unfreeze. You'll see it when your 72 hours finishes.

Please also note- Let's say you freeze 1K tron on Monday, and you freeze another 2K on Tuesday, it pushes the 72 hour clock starting Tues, not Monday.

All said and done, if you freeze enough Tron to cover your TX requirements for interacting with the network, you'll never spend any actual Tron.

How awesome is that?

Finally, lets assume you unlucky enough to find a TX which requires 4,000 bandwidth and 1M energy (which is unheard of, but lets say it happens). You click to sign for the TX and your energy is not enough. This is when you'll end up using actual Tron to have the transaction go through. In this example, your Tron wallet reads :10K Tron, 100K energy, 5000bandwidth. When you see the TX go through, and you go back to your wallet, you'll notice your Tron maybe 9,900 Tron, 0 energy, 1000 bandwidth. What that means is, you did not have enough energy to complete the transaction, so the Tron network automatically spent 100 Tron to conclude the transaction for you.

With my 100K energy and 5000 bandwidth, the most expensive TX I had was with a smart contract in a DeFi platform which went over 100K energy and burnt 17 TRX to conclude it. (like I said, I haven't paid a dollar, but I have about a quarter .25 so far).

So be wary that you always maintain a high level of energy before you interact with smart contracts. For swaps, LP staking, and so on, 20-59K in energy is more than enough. Also of note: I have not come across any transactions which require more than 450 bandwidth. Ever. So energy is the main concern from a "cost" perspective.

Now do you see why I used the word "free" that way. It is free from using TRX itself, but you lose access to working capital really. If you had 10000K Tron to stake or swap, and you freeze 3k, then you really only have access to 7K of Tron. Granted, you can always unfreeze after 3 days, and completing your TXs, then refreeze as needed, but since I transact more than once a day, I find it best to freeze and to keep it frozen. Plus I get the 1 TRX coming in from the freezing anyway, so I'm getting something for it as well. 

There is another method however, to put all your Tron to work. This of course, it by just paying the Tron fees for having 0 energy and just paying with Tron out right.

Finally, there is a 3rd option. Energy borrowing / rentals. There are places like tokengoodies.io  , which allow those who are sitting on surplus energy to rent that energy to someone else for a specific period of time. You can find out the details by just visiting the site, but I think it is about 40TRX per day for 680,000 energy. So for 120 TRX you can get 680K worth or energy a day. This will allow you to use your entire Tron balance, without having to freeze it yourself. Of course, you're paying someone else for freeze for you. And of course, you can rent out your surplus energy as well. To my knowledge, tokengoodies has a minimum amount which is rather large, so I don't really use it enough to know a lot about the fees, maximum, and minimum, etc. But if you happen to need oodles of energy quicks, you can always rent from someone else if you don't want to freeze. Or sell yours, if you don't need it.

So we've gone over comparisons, similarities between units of the two blockchains. Lets go over some pros and cons.

Etherum pros - before you accept a TX on metamask, you can check etherscan.io for gas fees and estimate how much gwei and gas limit you'll need to get your TX to go through in the time you want. It is reasonably specific.

Cons - gas fees fluctuate like crazy and your calculations mean fuck all when push comes to shove.

Tron Pros - super lower fees. Essentially free transactions. Super fast transactions (they confirm in seconds not minutes).

Tron Cons - VERY difficult to estimate how much energy you'll needs for TXs. Thus far, I've only been able to see how much I needed AFTER a TX went through by navigating to my Tron wallet address on Tronscan.io and looking up the last TX. There I can see how much energy it cost and estimate future costs from there. A bit annoying in fact.

So there you have it. In the beginning I also mentioned how Tron fees will stay low, with respect to the network itself, IF the Tron community does NOT vote to increase fees. Well about 2 weeks after I started using tron, they increased fees. Granted, it is by orders of magnitudes MUCH lower than ETH even at its cheapest point.  I think they raised the energy requirements by X%, thus forcing more people to either freeze more Tron to cover the higher energy requirements for TXs OR pay more with Tron itself. But you get the idea, by forcing more people to freeze more TRX, the total value locked (TVL) into the coin grows, and so does the value. On top, if people have to buy more Trx to either freeze, or pay for TX's, that also raises the value of Trx as well.

You get the drift. I hope by reading all of my blogs thus far, you are seeing some patterns emerge in the macro economics of crypto. All chains begin with super low fees and adoption. As adoption grows, the initial investors in the chain begin to increase fees for using the network and boost the price of the token / coin itself. They all do this. And I'm certain ADA, XLM, and EOS will be no different. The difference is, now, instead of one entity (your bank for example) saying "hey we are raising fees" it is an entire community, or delegates of that community, going "hey we're raising fees."

The democratization of greed. Not immutability of commerce it appears.

My next post will be about some of the DeFi projects I'm watching, using, and possibly have skin in the game. I think I've given everybody enough of a guide on how to navigate the projects I'll be mentioning to understand why I like them and why I'm following, or may be vested in.

But while the party is going, and before it gets stomped on and gutted, I'm enjoying my island. Compared to wanting to snap my keyboard when my 240 gwei TX would be stuck in limbo for 2 hours, after it JUST told me 2-3 mins for a TX, this is paradise. And if the fees go from 18 cents to 28 cents, I can live with that. But once it goes above $1, I'll be whistling dixie on my way to next "cheap" chain. EOS perhaps? I haven't interacted with it yet, but I am hearing some good things about it.

Until then, come enjoy the party with me, 

Old Grey Fox,

With this post, you get a double disclaimer.

#1)As always : THIS IS NOT INVESTING ADVICE. DO YOUR OWN DUE DILIGENCE AND RESEARCH. THIS IS JUST ME SHARING MY STORIES AND views / news updates.

#2) Tron's "CEO" has a pretty bad reputation. The network has had scandals involving rugpulls and other shady projects. Relative to Ethereum, I can't say if it as "solid" but from my personal experience, I haven't had any issues what so ever. But again, I'm no newbie to cryptos either. So be wary of airdrops and such (which happens frequently on Tron). Pay close attention to the tokens you're interacting with. Hence the importance of the block chain explorers from my previous post. Master them, before you dabble in other chains.

https://www.publish0x.com?a=JxboYq4Keg Sign up link for any readers who want to join this fun community.

Alphanova.crypto

Above is the .crypto address for anyone who wants to shoot me some cheddar for my thoughts. Please no BTC or ETH. Network fees are killer. Stick to LTC, XRP, ADA, or TRX. The last 3 are almost free in terms of network fees. Remember - no matter how much you send anywhere, choose a coin that's low in network fees. Anything besides ETH / BTC really...

And if you happen to be a Publish0X admin reading this, PLEASE CAN YOU GIVE US THE OPTION OF BEING REWARDED IN TRC-20 tokens vs only ERC-20 tokens? It's going to cost me $5+ to send the $1 which I have yet to earn from eth wallet to anywhere else.

PLEASE IMPLEMENT NON-ERC-20 tokens as rewards. THANKS!