One of the problems that NFT owners have to face is related to the cost of gas, which consists of the fees on transactions.

If on the one hand, it is a good thing to be able to freely dispose of one’s own NFTs without having to entrust others with their custody, to send them to a wallet, for example, it is always necessary to pay fees to the transaction validators.

However, these fees, also called “gas” in technical terms, vary greatly from network to network. Although the Ethereum network is the most used globally for NFT, it is also the most expensive, from this point of view.

For example, lately, the average fee cost for every single transaction recorded on its blockchain has almost always been over $40 (0.01 ETH), with the median being over $20 (0.005 ETH).

That doesn’t mean that you always need to spend at least $20 in ETH to get a transaction validated on Ethereum’s blockchain, just that paying lower fees risks very long validation times.

The fact is that on the Ethereum blockchain, a new block is validated every 13.5 seconds, so paying higher fees, you can get your transaction approved in a few seconds; otherwise, it could take minutes, hours, or in some cases even days, if the fees paid are very low.
On the other hand, sometimes there are “gas wars” that is, fee battles between different users who want to get their transactions validated before the others.

When several very hasty users compete with each other to try to get their transactions included in the next block, some kind of auctions can be triggered that can make the fees jump very high. It’s a rare phenomenon that usually occurs especially at key moments, such as IDOs (Initial DEX Offering), and often it’s enough to wait a few minutes for the situation to return to normal.