Why Ethereum Gas Fees Will Never Go Away

Remember paying $200 to swap $500 of tokens on Uniswap? I do. November 2021. Gas hit 300 gwei and a simple ERC-20 transfer cost $50. People were furious. Ethereum was supposed to be the future of finance, and the future cost more in fees than a bank wire.

Fast forward to February 2026. Gas fees on Ethereum mainnet are much lower. A typical swap costs $2 to $10 most of the time. Transfers run about $0.50 to $2. The scaling roadmap is working. L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base process transactions for pennies.

But here's the thing nobody wants to hear. Ethereum gas fees will never be zero. Not on mainnet. Probably not even on L2s in the long run. And that's not a bug. It's a fundamental design choice that keeps the network functioning.

Why Gas Fees Exist (The Technical Reason)

Gas fees serve a critical purpose. They prevent spam. Without fees, anyone could flood the Ethereum network with billions of meaningless transactions, grinding it to a halt. The cost of each transaction ensures that only transactions worth doing actually get submitted.

This is called "denial of service protection through economic cost." It's the same reason email providers charge senders (through server costs) instead of being completely free. If sending emails cost absolutely nothing, your inbox would be 100% spam.

Every Ethereum block has a limited amount of space (a gas limit). Transactions compete for that space by offering higher fees. When demand for block space is high, fees go up. When demand is low, fees go down. It's a market.

Getting rid of fees would mean getting rid of this market. And getting rid of this market would mean the network has no protection against spam, no way to prioritize urgent transactions, and no economic model for validators.

Why L2s Don't Solve It Completely

Layer 2 solutions have dramatically reduced fees for most users. A swap on Arbitrum costs about $0.10. A transfer on Base costs less than a penny. This is a huge improvement.

But L2 fees aren't zero either. And they can't be.

L2s still need to post data back to Ethereum mainnet. That costs gas. L2 operators need to run infrastructure. That costs money. And L2s have their own block space constraints that create fee markets when demand spikes.

During the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, Ethereum added "blobs" (EIP-4844) that reduced L2 data costs by roughly 90%. L2 fees dropped to fractions of a cent. But on busy days, even blob fees spike. When inscriptions and memecoins create activity bursts on L2s, fees jump 10x to 50x from their baseline.

The pattern is always the same. Technology improves, fees drop, more activity comes because it's cheaper, fees rise because of increased demand. Induced demand. It's the same phenomenon that happens when you add a lane to a highway. The extra capacity fills up with new drivers and traffic is back to where it started.

EIP-1559 Made Fees Predictable But Not Low

The EIP-1559 upgrade in August 2021 changed how Ethereum fees work. Instead of a pure auction, there's now a base fee set by the protocol plus an optional priority fee (tip) to validators.

The base fee adjusts automatically based on how full recent blocks are. If blocks are more than 50% full, the base fee goes up. If they're less than 50% full, the base fee goes down. This makes fees more predictable but doesn't cap them.

The important part: the base fee gets burned. Destroyed. This is what makes ETH potentially deflationary. When fees are high, more ETH gets burned than is issued through staking rewards, and the total supply shrinks.

Here's the catch. This burning mechanism only works if fees exist. If fees went to zero, no ETH gets burned, and the deflationary property of Ethereum disappears. The economic model of ETH as an asset depends on fees being paid. Ethereum needs gas fees to maintain its monetary premium.

The Demand Problem

Even if Ethereum's technology could theoretically support free transactions, the demand side makes it impossible.

Think about what zero fees would mean. Every bot, every MEV searcher, every spammer, every arbitrage algorithm, and every testing script would flood the network with transactions. Why not? It's free.

The current Ethereum mainnet processes about 15 to 30 transactions per second. With zero fees, millions of bots would compete for those 30 slots every second. The network would be instantly unusable for real users because bots would consume 100% of block space.

Fees are the filter. They ensure that only transactions with real economic value get processed. A $0.50 fee is meaningless for someone swapping $10,000 of tokens. But it's enough to make a spam bot's business model unprofitable at scale.

What About Solana and Other "Low Fee" Chains?

Solana's fees are typically $0.001 to $0.01 per transaction. Almost free. But notice I said "almost." Even Solana has fees. And during high demand periods (memecoin launches, popular NFT mints), Solana's priority fee market kicks in and fees can jump to $1 to $5.

Solana achieves low fees through a completely different architecture. It processes over 4,000 transactions per second, which means block space is abundant relative to demand most of the time. But when demand spikes, the same fee dynamic emerges.

And Solana has experienced network congestion and outages, partly because the economic barrier to transaction submission is so low that bots can overwhelm the network during peak demand. In April 2024, Solana's network was essentially unusable for regular users during a memecoin frenzy because bots were spamming transactions.

Low fees aren't free. There's always a trade off. Solana chose high throughput and low fees, which means it sometimes struggles with spam and network stability. Ethereum chose security and decentralization, which means higher fees but more reliable operation.

The Honest Future of Ethereum Fees

Here's my prediction for how this plays out over the next few years.

Mainnet fees will stay meaningful. Ethereum mainnet will remain expensive relative to L2s and competing chains. A simple transfer might stay in the $0.50 to $5 range. Complex DeFi transactions will stay in the $2 to $20 range. During market mania, fees will spike like they always have.

L2 fees will stay very low but never zero. Most L2s will maintain sub $0.10 transaction fees. Some might get below $0.01 for simple transfers. But they won't hit zero because operators need revenue and spam protection is necessary.

Fee spikes will always happen. Every time there's a new memecoin craze, a popular NFT drop, or a market crash that triggers mass liquidations, fees will spike dramatically. This has happened in every cycle and will continue to happen because block space is fundamentally limited.

Users will mostly not care. The L2 experience is already good enough for most users. Paying $0.05 for a swap on Base is functionally equivalent to free from a user experience perspective. The gas fee problem has been solved for 90% of use cases, even if it hasn't been eliminated.

The Real Issue Isn't Fees

The actual barrier to Ethereum adoption isn't fees anymore. It's UX complexity. Setting up a wallet, bridging tokens between chains, understanding gas mechanics, approving smart contracts. These are much bigger obstacles than a few cents in fees.

If Ethereum solves the UX problem, nobody will care about gas fees because they'll be invisible. Just like nobody thinks about the server costs behind a Google search. The cost exists, but it's abstracted away from the user.

Gas fees are Ethereum's immune system. They protect the network from abuse. Wanting them to disappear is like wanting your body to stop producing white blood cells because they make you feel tired when you're fighting an infection. They're doing their job. The goal isn't to remove them. It's to make them small enough that most users don't notice them while still protecting the network.

That's already happening on L2s. Ethereum's gas fee problem is being solved. It's just not being solved the way people wanted, by making mainnet free. Instead, it's being solved by building cheaper layers on top and letting mainnet be the expensive, secure settlement layer it was always meant to be.