Here’s How You Can Win A Gas War On An NFT Drop

Chain Debrief
October 4, 2021
8 mins read

One of the biggest challenges of the Ethereum network is the high transaction fees when the network is congested.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Ethereum network transaction capacity is at around 30 transactions per second. The Ethereum network is secured and operated by miners or network operators who confirm your transaction and mint them onto the Ethereum blockchain.

When the network is congested, the transaction fees can skyrocket as users pay more fees to the miners in order to incentivize them to proritize your transactions. This is commonly known as the gas war. Gas wars are very common during IDOs or new NFT minting where users rush to try to get a part of the initial mint.

For example, during the recent TIME NFT minting, the gas fee went up to over 3 ETH just to mint an NFT that was worth 0.1 ETH.

Time Magazine NFT drop pic.twitter.com/Rh6kWGphyW
— Beanie (@beaniemaxi) September 23, 2021

How to win a gas war

For readers interested to know how to navigate the gas war during popular NFT drops, here’s a quick guide.

Prior to the actual mint during preparation stage:
1. Open the official drop site
2. Find and open the drop’s contract on Etherscan
3. Open the Gas Now website to check what the current gas fee is

When the NFT is open for public minting, mint from the website directly, enter the amount you want to mint, and hit the “Mint” button.

After hitting the “Mint” button, you should see your MetaMask transaction open up. Hit “Edit” next to the estimated gas.

Once you are at the Edit page, click “Advanced Options”.

Enter the figure you see as “Rapid” on Gas Now into both boxes. You can also input a much higher gas fee depending on how much you want the transaction to go through.

Once you are done with that, keep an eye out on the Gas Fees on Gas Now. If the “Rapid” fee increases much higher than what you had inputted, go into your pending transaction on MetaMask and speed up to the new Rapid fee same steps as above.

Mint directly from contract

There might be time when the website of the project might crash or fail to load when there are too many users trying to access the website. If this happens, you may also mint directly from the contract.

To do this, simply visit the Etherscan contract tab of the drop and connect your wallet to the contract. Once you are done with that, go to the Contract Tab, choose Write Contract, and look for “Mint/ Buy” function.

Go to the Contract Tab, and Write Contract.