What is Gas?

When you make calls to the NEAR blockchain to update or change data, the people running the infrastructure of the blockchain incur some cost. At the end of the day, some computers somewhere process your request, and the validators running these computers spend significant capital to keep these computers running.

Like other programmable blockchains, NEAR compensates these people by charging transaction fees, also called gas fees.

• Gas units: internally, transaction fees are not calculated directly in NEAR tokens, but instead go through an in-between phase of "gas units". The benefit of gas units is that they are deterministic – the same transaction will always cost the same number of gas units. 10¹² gas units, or 1 TGas (TeraGas)
• Gas price: gas units are then multiplied by a gas price to determine how much to charge users. This price is automatically recalculated each block depending on network demand (if previous block is more than half full the price goes up, otherwise it goes down, and it won't change by more than 1% each block), and bottoms out at a price that's configured by the network, currently 100 million yoctoNEAR.

What is NEAR?​

Near Protocol is an L1 blockchain that emerged in 2018 and was initially designed to provide higher throughput, faster speeds, low-cost transactions, and cross-chain compatibility.

NEAR was one of the first chains to implement the “sharding” technique, a revolutionary PoS method for blockchain scaling. By using sharding, all transactions on the blockchain are split into chunks known as “shards.” This ensures that blocks reach finality in less than 2 seconds. The consensus mechanism on NEAR is called “Nightshade.”

Methoodology

In this dashboard, by using flipside_prod_db.mdao_near.transactions table, I will try to find contracts that users are spending the most gas on to use under three different conditions:

• Overall
• Daily based on the past week
• Daily based on the past month

First: Contracts with most used gas on overall

From the pie chart below we can understand that Aurora has the first place in the total amount of gas used on followed by nearcrowd.

The daily chart also has the same pattern: Aurora has the first rank with a significant difference on all days.

The following charts show the daily used gas fees on different contracts on the past week.

On the previous week aurora was responsible for about 84 perecent of gas between the contracts that users are spending the most gas on to use.

followed by nearcrowd with 7 percent and zomland with 1 percent.

As we saw before there is a huge difference between the first place and the others.

In the following chart, we are going to get dip into top gas used contracts.

Also during the past week Aurora was the top used gas contract.

Let's compare last month with last week. Nearcrowd share was about 12.6 percent, which decreased to 7 percent last week, showing a decrease in the popularity of Nearcrowd, a service that allows people to earn Near by completing small tasks.

Last but not least, let’s find which contracts were responsible for the most used gases for failure transactions. As previously mentioned, Aurora is our first rank, followed by ref-finance and Nearcrowd.

Conclusion

In this dashboard, we tried to get deep into the Gas principle on the Near blockchain by giving a brief definition and finding contracts that users spend the most gas on to use and finally tried to see how gas usage changed over the past week and the past month.