Gas

This page describes the technical details around gas during the lifecycle of a transaction(*) while giving an intuition for why things are the way they are from a technical perspective. For a more practical, user-oriented angle, please refer to the gas section in the official protocol documentation.

(*) For this page, a transaction shall refer to the set of all recursively generated receipts by a SignedTransaction. When referring to only the original transaction object, we write SignedTransaction.

The topic is split into several sections.

  1. Gas Flow
  2. Gas Price:
  3. Tracking Gas: How the system keeps track of purchased gas during the transaction execution.

Gas Flow

On the highest level, gas is bought by the signer, burnt during execution, and contracts receive a part of the burnt gas as a reward. We will discuss each step in more details.

Buying Gas for a Transaction

A signer pays all the gas required for a transaction upfront. However, there is no explicit act of buying gas. Instead, the fee is subtracted directly in NEAR tokens from the balance of the signer's account. If we ignore all the details explained further down, the fee is calculated as gas amount * gas price.

The gas amount is not a field of SignedTransaction, nor is it something the signer can choose. It is only a virtual field that is computed on-chain following the protocol's rules.

The gas price is a variable that may change during the execution of the transaction. The way it is implemented today, a single transaction can be charged a different gas price for different receipts.

Already we can see a fundamental problem: Gas is bought once at the beginning but the gas price may change during execution. To solve this incompatibility, the protocol calculates a pessimistic gas price for the initial purchase. Later on, the delta between real and pessimistic gas prices is refunded at the end of every receipt execution.

An alternative implementation would instead charge the gas at every receipt, instead of once at the start. However, remember that the execution may happen on a different shard than the signer account. Therefore we cannot access the signer's balance while executing.

Burning Gas

Buying gas immediately removes a part of the signer's tokens from the total supply. However, the equivalent value in gas still exists in the form of the receipt and the unused gas will be converted back to tokens as a refund.

The gas spent on execution on the other hand is burnt and removed from total supply forever. Unlike gas in other chains, none of it goes to validators. This is roughly equivalent to the base fee burning mechanism which Ethereum added in EIP-1559. But in Near Protocol, the entire fee is burnt because there is no priority fee that Ethereum pays out to validators.

The following diagram shows how gas flows through the execution of a transaction. The transaction consists of a function call performing a cross contract call, hence two function calls in sequence. (Note: This diagram is heavily simplified, more accurate diagrams are further down.)

Very Simplified Gas Flow Diagram

Gas in Contract Calls

A function call has a fixed gas cost to be initiated. Then the execution itself draws gas from the attached_gas, sometimes also called prepaid_gas, until it reaches zero, at which point the function call aborts with a GasExceeded error. No changes are persisted on chain.

(Note on naming: If you see prepaid_fee: Balance in the nearcore code base, this is NOT only the fee for prepaid_gas. It also includes prepaid fees for other gas costs. However, prepaid_gas: Gas is used the same in the code base as described in this document.)

Attaching gas to function calls is the primary way for end-users and contract developers to interact with gas. All other gas fees are implicitly computed and are hidden from the users except for the fact that the equivalent in tokens is removed from their account balance.

To attach gas, the signer sets the gas field of the function call action. Wallets and CLI tools expose this to the users in different ways. Usually just as a gas field, which makes users believe this is the maximum gas the transaction will consume. Which is not true, the maximum is the specified number plus the fixed base cost.

Contract developers also have to pick the attached gas values when their contract calls another contract. They cannot buy additional gas, they have to work with the unspent gas attached to the current call. They can check how much gas is left by subtracting the used_gas() from the prepaid_gas() host function results. But they cannot use all the available gas, since that would prevent the current function call from executing to the end.

The gas attached to a function can be at most max_total_prepaid_gas, which is 300 Tgas since the mainnet launch. Note that this limit is per SignedTransaction, not per function call. In other words, batched function calls share this limit.

There is also a limit to how much single call can burn, max_gas_burnt, which used to be 200 Tgas but has been increased to 300 Tgas in protocol version 52. (Note: When attaching gas to an outgoing function call, this is not counted as gas burnt.) However, given a call can never burn more than was attached anyway, this second limit is obsolete with the current configuration where the two limits are equal.

Since protocol version 53, with the stabilization of NEP-264, contract developers do not have to specify the absolute amount of gas to attach to calls. promise_batch_action_function_call_weight allows to specify a ratio of unspent gas that is computed after the current call has finished. This allows attaching 100% of unspent gas to a call. If there are multiple calls, this allows attaching an equal fraction to each, or any other split as defined by the weight per call.

Contract Reward

A rather unique property of Near Protocol is that a part of the gas fee goes to the contract owner. This "smart contract gets paid" model is pretty much the opposite design choice from the "smart contract pays" model that for example Cycles in the Internet Computer implement.

The idea is that it gives contract developers a source of income and hence an incentive to create useful contracts that are commonly used. But there are also downsides, such as when implementing a free meta-transaction relayer one has to be careful not to be susceptible to faucet-draining attacks where an attacker extracts funds from the relayer by making calls to a contract they own.

How much contracts receive from execution depends on two things.

  1. How much gas is burnt on the function call execution itself. That is, only the gas taken from the attached_gas of a function call is considered for contract rewards. The base fees paid for creating the receipt, including the action_function_call fee, are burnt 100%.
  2. The remainder of the burnt gas is multiplied by the runtime configuration parameter burnt_gas_reward which currently is at 30%.

During receipt execution, nearcore code tracks the gas_burnt_for_function_call separately from other gas burning to enable this contract reward calculations.

In the (still simplified) flow diagram, the contract reward looks like this. For brevity, gas_burnt_for_function_call in the diagram is denoted as wasm fee.

Slightly Simplified Gas Flow Diagram

Gas Price

Gas pricing is a surprisingly deep and complicated topic. Usually, we only think about the value of the gas_price field in the block header. However, to understand the internals, this is not enough.

Block-Level Gas Price

gas_price is a field in the block header. It determines how much it costs to burn gas at the given block height. Confusingly, this is not the same price at which gas is purchased. (See Effective Gas Purchase Price.)

The price is measured in NEAR tokens per unit of gas. It dynamically changes in the range between 0.1 NEAR per Pgas and 2 NEAR per Pgas, based on demand. (1 Pgas = 1000 Tgas corresponds to a full chunk.)

The block producer has to set this field following the exact formula as defined by the protocol. Otherwise, the produced block is invalid.

Intuitively, the formula checks how much gas was used compared to the total capacity. If it exceeds 50%, the gas price increases exponentially within the limits. When the demand is below 50%, it decreases exponentially. In practice, it stays at the bottom most of the time.

Note that all shards share the same gas price. Hence, if one out of four shards is at 100% capacity, this will not cause the price to increase. The 50% capacity is calculated as an average across all shards.

Going slightly off-topic, it should also be mentioned that chunk capacity is not constant. Chunk producers can change it by 0.1% per chunk. The nearcore client does not currently make use of this option, so it really is a nitpick only relevant in theory. However, any client implementation such as nearcore must compute the total capacity as the sum of gas limits stored in the chunk headers to be compliant. Using a hard-coded 1000 Tgas * num_shards would lead to incorrect block header validation.

Pessimistic Gas Price

The pessimistic gas price calculation uses the fact that any transaction can only have a limited depth in the generated receipt DAG. For most actions, the depth is a constant 1 or 2. For function call actions, it is limited to a hand-wavy attached_gas / min gas per function call. (Note: attached_gas is a property of a single action and is only a part of the total gas costs of a receipt.)

Once the maximum depth is known, the protocol assumes that the gas price will not change more than 3% per receipt. This is not a guarantee since receipts can be delayed for virtually unlimited blocks.

The final formula for the pessimistic gas price is the following.

pessimistic(current_gas_price, max_depth) = current_gas_price × 1.03^max_depth

This still is not the price at which gas is purchased. But we are very close.

Effective Gas Purchase Cost

When a transaction is converted to its root action receipt, the gas costs are calculated in two parts.

Part one contains all the gas which is burnt immediately. Namely, the send costs for a receipt and all the actions it includes. This is charged at the current block-level gas price.

Part two is everything else, from execution costs of actions that are statically known such as CreateAccount all the way to attached_gas for function calls. All of this is purchased at the same pessimistic gas price, even if some actions inside might have a lower maximum call depth than others.

The deducted tokens are the sum of these two parts. If the account has insufficient balance to pay for this pessimistic pricing, it will fail with a NotEnoughBalance error, with the required balance included in the error message.

Inserting the pessimistic gas pricing into the flow diagram, we finally have a complete picture. Note how an additional refund receipt is required. Also, check out the updated formula for the effective purchase price at the top left and the resulting higher number.

Complete Gas Flow Diagram

Tracking Gas in Receipts

The previous section explained how gas is bought and what determines its price. This section details the tracking that enables correct refunds.

First, when a SignedTransaction is converted to a receipt, the pessimistic gas price is written to the receipt's gas_price field.

Later on, when the receipt has been executed, a gas refund is created at the value of receipt.gas_burnt * (block_header.gas_price - receipt.gas_price).

Some gas goes attaches to outgoing receipts. We commonly refer to this as used gas that was not burnt, yet. The refund excludes this gas. But it includes the receipt send cost.

Finally, unspent gas is refunded at the full receipt.gas_price. This refund is merged with the refund for burnt gas of the same receipt outcome to reduce the number of spawned system receipts. But it makes it a bit harder to interpret refunds when backtracking for how much gas a specific refund receipt covers.