Gas
The fee paid to a blockchain to process a transaction. Gas is denominated in the chain's native token and varies with network demand. Sending a transaction without enough gas means the transaction fails and the gas is still consumed.
Also known as: gas fee, transaction fee
Gas is the mechanism blockchains use to charge for computation and prevent infinite loops or denial-of-service attacks. Every operation a smart contract performs (adding two numbers, writing to storage, calling another contract) has a defined gas cost. The total gas a transaction consumes is the sum of all the operations it performs. The user pays the gas cost in the chain’s native token at the gas price set by the network at the moment the transaction lands.
Gas prices vary with demand. When the network is busy, users compete for limited block space by bidding higher gas prices. The validator producing the next block selects the highest-paying transactions first, so users who bid too low have to wait. Ethereum’s gas auction was the canonical example, with prices spiking from a few gwei to thousands of gwei during peak periods. NEAR, Solana, and most modern chains have lower and more stable gas prices because their throughput is higher relative to demand.
Gas burning is a related mechanism that destroys a portion of every gas fee instead of paying it all to validators. Ethereum’s EIP-1559 burns the base fee component of every transaction, which means more network activity directly reduces ETH supply. NEAR burns 70% of base gas. The economic effect is to tie token supply to network usage: busy chains burn more, idle chains burn less, and the burn rate becomes a measure of how much real demand exists for the chain’s block space.
In DeAI specifically, gas matters because most decentralised AI projects involve some on-chain settlement. NEAR’s low gas costs are part of why it positions itself as an AI-friendly L1. Bittensor’s gas costs are higher because the chain processes more complex subnet logic per transaction. Base (Coinbase’s L2) has very low gas costs which is part of why Venice’s VVV token and many x402 payment rails settle there. The OYM project reviews note when gas costs meaningfully affect a project’s user experience or economics.