So you’ve decided to “trade NFTs” because “flipping jpegs is a good way to make money.” Your friends and family think you’re a degenerate because all you do is lose money with NFTs. And most of your financial loss is from losing gas wars. No worries – your friends and family don’t understand you but I do because I, too, am a degen. In this post, I’ll show you how to not lose gas wars so you can either:

1. Mint your NFT and flip it, or
2. Minimize your loss if you don’t end up minting your NFT.

Please note: “Gas wars” in this post is referring to an event where the “gas” of Ethereum jumps to a very high level when a new NFT is released. This post does not cover how to win gas wars for trading DeFi tokens.

How To Not Lose Gas Wars By Setting Your Gas Way High

You’re looking to mint an NFT so you can flip it. So you read the conversation on Discord and they talk about how you just set your “Metamask” suggested setting to “High” and everything’s Gucci. What they’re talking about is this:

My first advice to you is don’t listen to anyone on Discord telling you how to make money. It’s a great way to lose all of your money.

The second advice is, during a mint event, the recommend “high” has is not nearly enough. The reason’s because the gas estimates are late. Here’s what I mean: Metamask gives you a “high” gas estimate based on the current network conditions. For example, the screenshot above is telling me to use 75 gwei for these network conditions:

But if you only use 75 gwei, you might as well flush money down the toilet because:

1. Metamask gives you delayed information, so the recommended setting might be for what the network looks like a few seconds ago.
2. As soon as an NFT is dropped, the Ethereum network will explode with requests, which means the low/average/high gwei distribution can exponentially increase within split seconds.
3. By the time your request goes into the Ethereum pending pool, the 75 gwei you set is already old news.
4. Thus, if you just go with the recommended “high” setting, you’ll be quite late. Everyone else that has 1000+ gwei will be the only ones that might have a chance of winning. And your transaction will be dropped.

So how do you set your gwei so you don’t lose gas wars? And more importantly, how much should you set your gwei?

Let me talk you through how to customize your gwei settings, and then talk to you about how much gwei you should be setting based on current conditions.

How To Manually Configure Your Gas Price On Metamask:

First, you’ll want to make sure your wallet’s set up correctly so you can easily edit your gwei each time. Clip on the top-right profile button in your Metamask, then press Settings.

Go to Advanced.

Scroll down and make sure your Advanced gas controls is set to ON.

The above steps makes it so that there’s less buttons to click for you to manually adjust your gas pricing. This will shave precious seconds off when you’re under the time pressure to mint a fresh NFT drop.

Once you’ve got your wallet configured correctly, do the following steps to adjust your gas price manually:

First, when when you press the “mint” button for an NFT drop with your Metamask, you’ll see the following window. Press edit:

Then, you’ll see this screen where you’ll be able to manually adjust your gas and priority fees:

OK, but what the hells is a “max fee” and “max priority fee”? The Max fee (GWEI) is just saying how much gas do you want to pay for this transaction. The Max priority fee (GWEI) says how much do you want to tip the Ethereum miner that helps you process this transaction.

Let me explain more in the next section below.

Max fee (GWEI) setting:

A couple weeks ago, an acceptable gwei (for max fee) would be ~300 gwei for minting events. Nowadays, the gwei would be ~2000 gwei to ~3000 gwei depending on hype.

Thus, I’d say it really depends on when you’re reading this article. But as I’m currently seeing mints at 2000-3000 gwei, and perhaps 8000+ gwei for some projects, I’d probably do 1500-2000 gwei.

The examples and explanations below assume I’m using 2K gwei.

2000 gwei max fee just says: I want to, in the worst case, spend 2000 gwei. If you’re quite quick, you could get away with, say, 100 gwei. But setting 2000 gwei tells the network, and the miners, that you’re serious about this mint. Even if the network conditions are at ~100 gwei, it’s more likely that your transaction will get accepted into a mining block before someone that’s set their max fee to 200 gwei.

Since money is a real thing, I use the following rule of thumb:

1000 gwei is approximately 1 ETH.

There’s no real way to know how much gwei is an ETH and I’ve seen some where 1500 gwei is 1 ETH or 900 gwei is 1 ETH. The reason’s because the max fee is the gwei you want to pay per gas. In other words, the amount you pay = (Max Fee + Max Priority Fee) * Gas Limit.

The Gas Limit describes how complex the contract is. The more complex the contract is, the more ETH you have to pay.

There’s 2 rules when setting your Max fee (GWEI) on Metamask:

1. Given your esimates of how much 1000 gwei would be in ETH, determine beforehand how much gwei you’re willing to bid.
2. Don’t be cheap with your gwei. As minting is ultra-competitive, a lowball offer will likely get rejected. Let’s say you wanted to set 69 gwei on a very competitive project. It ends up at 1000 gwei, you’ll fail the mint and lose transaction fees as well. Conversely let’s say you set 2000 gwei while network condition’s at 69 gwei. You get lucky and pay the 69 gwei anyway because everyone else is too slow.

As a failed mint contract can cost you a ton of money (~$100), you should only participate in NFT drops if you are committed to minting the NFT. If you try to lowball the gas, you have a high probability of losing ~$100 in transaction fees – you’d be better off going to OpenSea and purchasing in the secondary market in those cases. For example:

• You don’t even try to mint the NFT drop. You lose $0.
• You try to mint the NFT drop, but you lowball the gwei and lose ~$100.
• You commit to minting the NFT drop and set a high max fee, and you get your NFT to flip.

In other words: if you don’t have enough money to pay risk the required gwei to mint, don’t mint! Better yet, if you don’t have the money to risk, don’t buy NFTs in general!

Max Priority Fee (GWEI) Setting:

Last week, setting max priority fee (which I’ll refer to as just the tip from now on) to 10 was sufficient.

For more recently hyped projects where people are setting 2000-8000 gwei (max fee), I’ve seen successful transactions go through that are setting 200 gwei tips.

But I’ve also seen 2000 gwei (max fee) transactions go through with 0 gwei tips.

At the end of the day, the tip is just a tip and it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the transaction. It just maximizes your chances of an Ethereum miner accepting your bid. If:

• Someone is using 2000 gwei max fee with no tips, and
• You’re using 2000 gwei max fee with 200 gwei tips to the miner

Which transaction do you think the miner’s more likely to take?

If you really would like your transaction to go through, I’d recommend setting your gwei tips to around 10% of your max fee.

Don’t Lose Gas Wars And Cancel Your Transaction!

If you didn’t already know this, the next few paragraphs is about to save you thousands of dollars.

Suppose the following:

1. You’re trying to mint an NFT drop and you want to mint 5 pieces of art, at .07 ETH each. So you mint initiate a transaction to send .35ETH to the website.
2. You set your max fee to 1000 gwei, and your tips to 200 gwei.
3. Your transaction sits in pending.
4. Everyone on Discord celebrates that they’ve minted The Currently Most Hyped NFT.
5. Your transaction is still pending.
6. The minting is almost done and your transaction doesn’t look like it’ll go through.
7. You freak out.

What do you do next? Do you try to cancel the transaction? And how much money will you lose?

Some folks seem to believe they’ll lose the .35 ETH. This is just not true. You don’t pay the .35 ETH if your transaction doesn’t go through.

Read the above again if you don’t already know this. Because this will save you a ton of money.

What you should do next is absolutely nothing. DO NOT CANCEL YOUR TRANSACTION.

The reason’s because during a mint, the gas price is extraordinarily high. If you put a bid of 1000 gwei max fee and it didn’t go through, chances are the gas are much higher. If you try to cancel your old transaction, you’ll need a new transaction to cancel your old transaction. But your new transaction to cancel your old transaction will be charged a lot of money because the network is congested (due to the mint). So instead of paying 3000 gwei or whatever insane gwei to cancel your transaction, just do nothing.

Once the minting event finishes, your transaction will get dropped and the “burnt gas fee” you pay will be very minimal. Here’s an example of a failed mint:

I lost $96.79 (.0298 ETH) when TheSevens’ supply ran out. I put in 1,100 gwei for my max fee and 11 gwei for my tips.

Compare this $96.79 loss to the scenario where I panic and cancel the contract at the peak of the mint (~6000-8000 gwei). I’d have lost around $600-800 instead of only $96.79.

The lesson: keep calm and let your contract die.

Summary

In this post, I talk about 2 main ways not to lose gas wars:

• Set your gas much higher than the network conditions. If your gas is too low, you have 0% probability of minting an NFT successfully – or a 100% chance of losing ~$100. If you set your gas high, you have a nonzero chance of actually minting an NFT and making a profit from it. If you feel you have to set your gas so high that you can’t feasibly flip the NFT, then don’t mint the NFT!
• Never press the cancel button on Metamask during a mint. You’ll be charged maximum gas (since you’ll be cancelling near the peak of the mint). Just wait for the contract to die so you don’t have to pay as big a penalty for losing out.

The first tip helps you maximize your chances of winning a gas war, and the second tip helps you minimize your downside when you do lose.