Using Custom Gas

Transactions are written on the blockchain by people called miners and secured by validators. Most normal people like us don’t actually interact with the blockchain directly; rather, a miner does it on our behalf in exchange for a small fee called Gas. In this article, we’ll talk about setting custom gas fees: what they are and how to change them. For additional resources, please check out our Gas Fees Explained article.

Rainbow predicts the gas price for you:

As an overview, Rainbow automatically predicts the amount of gas that you will likely need to successfully complete a transaction. This prediction is set by default but can be changed manually to increase or decrease the speed at which your transaction will complete.

If your gas fee is too low though or if the demand suddenly increases after submitting, your transaction might fail or take longer than expected.

Setting custom gas prices:

Setting a custom price for the Max base fee and Miner tip let’s you control the total price of your Ethereum transaction, and how quickly it will be included in the blockchain.

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Remember gas costs fluctuate constantly based on supply and demand, and miners prioritize transactions based on the amount of gas that is submitted (the more you pay in gas relative to others, the greater your chances of your transaction being picked up by the miner). During times of peak demand, so many people are competing for a miner’s attention that you have to pay a higher amount of gas in order to get through.

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Again, normally, Rainbow chooses the prices for you. If you want to set them yourself, once you begin the process of creating a transaction, you can open the gas price menu and choose custom.

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You’ll want to be careful not to set the gas too low. If the transaction gets stuck you will have to cancel or speed up the transaction later. For additional information, check out our Cancel a Transaction and Speed up a Transaction help articles.