Introducing Filecoin Gas Estimator Project

Zondax is excited to announce the final release of a project that our engineers have been working on for the past few months - the Filecoin Gas Estimator project.

Since we have officially launched the project for public use, what is the significance of our work? Who shall benefit from the project and why? In this article, our engineers will walk you through the questions and demonstrate our contribution to this unique project.

"Gas" was initially proposed on the Ethereum blockchain and then applied to the Filecoin blockchain, which is considered the fuel of the Filecoin network.

Filecoin gas, or "filgas," aims to provide a service for fees-related data insights for an end-user of the Filecoin blockchain. The processing of a message consumes units of computation and storage. Therefore, the message sender needs to pay the Gas Fee with Filecoin’s token ($FIL). In other words, when creating a transaction, the frontend (Filecoin-web project) provides information on how much Gas and fees the user will have to pay for creating the desired transaction (using a probabilistic model) and the estimated time for the transaction to reach a block.

Alongside, the webpage shows all the current transactions in the mempool in almost real-time. By showing the mempool, users can know in advance what are the transactions that will be included in the next couple of blocks. Such a setting determines that the message sender can set a GasLimit in each message sent, providing an upper bound on the consumption of Gas and the maximum cost that the message sender is willing to pay.

Filgas Estimator project is essentially the combination of two components: backend and frontend. Engineers from Zondax have built every critical component of the project: indexers, backend service, data post-processing, and frontend.

• Backend: It is written in golang, and its purpose is to consume the indexed data from our specialized Filecoin data indexers, make some post-processing of that data and serve the results to the frontend.

• Frontend: Essentially webpage with an intuitive UI, showing user several visual indicators like a table with the mempool transactions, nice historical graphs of some gas-related variables and the fees prediction model that tells you how much to pay for a given transaction (with a level of confidence, because it’s a probabilistic model)

So here is where our Gas Estimator comes in and makes a difference. For each transaction, the required gas fee depends on the individual's priority.

• If the user wish to execute a transaction promptly, then the individual should set a high gas fee;

• If waiting is fine, then a lower fee can be used. But to optimize the cost and the time, it is recommended to use a Gas Estimator as a reference as it will calculate the optimized gas parameters taking into account the current chain’s traffic.

It is common to see questions such as:

• I’ve created a transaction X but it is stuck on the mempool. Why?

• My transaction got rejected with the error “not enough gas”. What happened?”

And here is the answer for most of the times: you’ve set low values for gasPremium and/or for gasLimit. If you set those values ‘low’, especially gasPremium (which represents the ‘tip’ that the miner will get if he confirms that transaction)  the transaction won’t be attractive to the miners because they always want to maximize their revenue by choosing the transaction that ‘pays the most’, ergo stuck in the mempool forever, which is, understandably, not so desired.

Filecoin miners, who perform all the important tasks of verifying and processing transactions on the network, are awarded this fee in return for their computational services. If the gas price limit is too low, miners can choose to ignore such transactions. As such, the price of gas fluctuates (priced in FIL) with supply and demand for processing power.

Filecoin Gas tells the user the values of gasPremium that will prevent the transaction from being stuck forever in the mempool, thus, avoiding the problem described above. Therefore, deploying an innovative project like Filecoin Gas Estimator is beneficial for users and Filecoin as it helps prevent undesired consequences in transactions and fosters blockchain transparency.

Even though the Filecoin chain is massive - more than 6TB now and growing every day, Zondax's engineers have tackled the challenge of processing such data fast and reliable.

The Filecoin Gas Estimator project is now available for the public to use at here. Need to know more about Filecoin Gas Fees, GasLimit, and GasPremium? Check out the well-written summary by Filecoin at here.

Interested in knowing more about our innovative blockchain services and discussing opportunities? Let’s connect today!