Ethereum Gas Around 1 Gwei: Why an ETH Transfer Now Costs Six Cents

The Ethereum price stood at $2,711 on Tuesday morning, or 2,392 euros, roughly 1.2 percent above where it was 24 hours earlier. The real news of the day, though, is not in the price but in the fee. A simple ETH transfer on the Ethereum network currently costs about six cents. Anyone who wants to move funds off an exchange into their own custody, consolidate several addresses or revoke an old token approval has an unusually cheap window for it.

This article lists the numbers one by one, works through the cost of the three most common transaction types, sets out what a move between your own addresses means for tax, and names the deadline that falls on October 6 on the Sepolia testnet. All price figures come from the exchange Kraken, the fee readings from Etherscan's gas tracker, both taken on the morning of September 29.

Ethereum price today: $2,711 and an eleven-dollar spread across six daily closes

In euros, ETH stood at 2,392 euros on Tuesday morning. The trading range of the past 24 hours ran from 2,319 to 2,408 euros. In dollar terms the price is $2,711, with a daily low of $2,637 and a daily high of $2,734.

What stands out is not the movement but its absence. The six daily closes from September 23 to September 28 came in at $2,683.99, $2,687.24, $2,691.35, $2,695.35, $2,688.02 and $2,687.45. Between the highest and the lowest of those six closes lie $11.36, less than half a percent. A market that closes inside such a bracket for six days running has neither buyers nor sellers willing to shift the price.

The frame for this quiet spell was set the week before. On September 20 ETH fell as far as $2,563; on September 21 the price shot up to $2,807 and closed at $2,776. Since then the range has narrowed day by day. For you as an investor that means one thing above all for now: the risk that the price moves appreciably while a transfer is in flight is currently small.

Ethereum gas around 1 Gwei: what an ETH transfer costs on Tuesday

Gas is the unit in which Ethereum measures the work a transaction takes. The price of that unit is quoted in Gwei, and one Gwei is a billionth of an ETH. The arithmetic is simple: gas used times the gas price in Gwei gives the fee in ETH.

On Tuesday morning the base fee suggested by the network ranged between 0.89 and 1.31 Gwei across several readings, and sat at roughly 1.1 Gwei in the most recently measured blocks. For a fast confirmation the gas tracker quotes values around 1.25 Gwei. That gives the following costs, calculated at the euro price of 2,392 euros per ETH:

The gas figures for token transfers and swaps are guide values, not fixed numbers; they depend on the contract involved. The 21,000 gas for a simple transfer, by contrast, is written into the protocol and does not change. How to read the current value for yourself is set out in detail in our guide to Ethereum gas and Etherscan.

For context: in periods of heavy demand the same transfer has cost double-digit euro amounts. That it now sits in the single-digit cents is not a given. It is the result of a network in which the bulk of activity has migrated to layer-2 networks.

Base fee, priority fee and gas limit: what the Ethereum network fee is made of

Three terms decide what you pay in the end, and they are regularly confused with one another.

Base fee

The base fee is the minimum price per unit of gas that the protocol sets for the current block. The value rises when the preceding blocks were more than half full and falls otherwise. This part of the fee is burned, so it goes to nobody. On Tuesday morning it stood at roughly 1.1 Gwei.

Priority fee

The priority fee is the voluntary tip to the validator who proposes your block. That tip decides how far forward in the block your transaction lands. In the current conditions a few thousandths of a Gwei are enough, because on this morning's readings the blocks were only 27 to 73 percent full.

Gas limit

The gas limit is the ceiling on the units of gas you release for a transaction. If the transaction uses less, you get the difference back. Set it too low and the transaction fails while the gas it consumed is gone anyway. The technical description of this mechanism is in the gas documentation on ethereum.org.

In practice: you have no influence over the base fee, but you do over the timing. And it is the timing that is favourable this week.

Self-custody after the Bitget attack: the move costs six cents

On September 29 it emerged that $387.5 million had flowed out of the exchange Bitget, by the exchange's own account, with the attack running through third-party security software as far as is known so far. The details are in our report on the attack path through third-party software. An incident like that is no argument against exchanges in general, but it answers a question many investors are asking anyway: what is still sitting there that does not need to be sitting there?

Self-custody means that the private keys to your coins are held by you and not by a service provider. The advantage is that no outside break-in and no outside insolvency can reach your holdings. The price is responsibility: a lost recovery phrase is lost for good, and nobody can reset it.

Anyone who was planning this step anyway will find the cheapest argument for it this week. Moving funds from an exchange to your own address is technically a simple ETH transfer and costs around six cents on the network side. The regular expense is the exchange's own withdrawal fee, which is independent of the network fee and at many providers sits well above it. Which devices are suitable for storage, and how to recognise a reputable model, is covered in our hardware wallet comparison.

Two checks before any larger move have proved their worth. First: send a small amount ahead and wait for the confirmation before the rest follows. The six cents for that test run are currently the cheapest insurance on the market. Second: make sure the destination address really is an Ethereum address on mainnet and not an address on a layer-2 network with the same character string.

Holding period and the per-wallet view: why a transfer to yourself is not a sale

This is the point at which many investors in Germany hesitate, and for an understandable reason: the worry is the one-year holding period, which a move supposedly destroys. On the tax authorities' reading, that worry is unfounded.

What governs the question is the German Federal Ministry of Finance circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets, dated March 6, 2025. For private investors it says, in essence: crypto assets are other economic goods, their sale is a private disposal transaction, and once a year has passed between acquisition and sale the gain remains tax-free. A sale or a swap triggers the tax. A move between addresses that both belong to you is neither of those. The clock keeps running.

Two points are still worth keeping in view, and both are practical.

Holdings are assessed per wallet

The tax authorities assess holdings on a per-wallet basis. Once an allocation method has been chosen it is to be retained per wallet and per trading designation until everything there has been disposed of. Consolidating holdings from several sources onto one address does not make the later allocation easier but harder.

The documentation stays your job

A move is tax-neutral, but it has to be traceable. For every movement, record the date, the amount, the sending and receiving address and the transaction proof. If you would rather not keep that by hand, our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers lists programs that read addresses in automatically and mark your own transfers as such. None of this replaces tax advice in an individual case.

Glamsterdam on Sepolia on October 6: EIP-8037 and EIP-2780 reach into gas pricing

The cheap fee environment is not a permanent state, and the next intervention is already scheduled. The Ethereum Foundation announced on September 17 that the upgrade named Glamsterdam will be activated on the Sepolia testnet on October 6 at 13:53:36 UTC, at epoch 353,024 and slot 11,296,768. What that means for the price in the run-up is set out in our piece on the Sepolia fork on October 6.

A testnet is a parallel Ethereum network with worthless coins on which changes are tried out before mainnet. Sepolia is one of them. Important for context: the foundation's announcement expressly names no date for mainnet. It states that the activation dates for Hoodi and for mainnet have not been decided and that the announcement plans no mainnet upgrade.

Glamsterdam matters for the subject of this article because several of the change proposals it contains act directly on gas pricing. The Ethereum Foundation announcement names, among others, EIP-8037 raising the gas costs of creating state data, EIP-8038 recalculating the cost of state access, EIP-2780 for a resource-based base cost per transaction, EIP-7976 raising the minimum cost of calldata and EIP-7981 making access lists more expensive. On top of those come EIP-7732 for the enshrined separation of proposer and block builder and EIP-7928 for block-level access lists.

For you as an investor, nothing follows that you would have to act on today, because a testnet does not touch your holdings. If, on the other hand, you run a node or a validator on Sepolia yourself, the announcement expressly requires both the execution layer and the consensus layer to be brought up to a supporting version in good time. For validators that applies to beacon nodes and validator software alike.

Ethereum network fees: $1.57 million in a single day

A low fee per transaction does not mean there is little going on in the network. According to DefiLlama data, fees of $1.57 million accrued on the Ethereum network over the past 24 hours. Across seven days that adds up to $6.07 million, across thirty days to $14.80 million.

Together those three numbers give a picture the plain Gwei reading does not show. The thirty-day figure corresponds to a daily average of roughly $493,000. Yesterday, at $1.57 million, was therefore more than three times as high, and against the previous day DefiLlama records a rise of 34 percent. Activity is picking up, and the fee per operation stays low regardless.

Both fit together, because a large share of demand now runs over layer-2 networks that write their data to mainnet in bundles. The core of that observation for your decision: the currently cheap window does not rest on an empty network but on a structure that shifts load elsewhere. It can close if that structure changes, and several of the change proposals named above are aimed at precisely that.

What the low network fee does not make cheaper: spread, withdrawal fee and network choice

The six cents are honestly calculated, but they are not the whole price of a move. Three items are untouched by them, and taken together they are regularly larger than the network fee itself.

The first is the exchange's withdrawal fee. Many providers charge a flat fee per withdrawal that they calculate independently of the actual network load. It is worth reading that item in your account before withdrawing, because the differences between providers are considerable, and on small amounts the withdrawal fee exceeds the network fee many times over.

The second is the spread, the difference between the buying and the selling price. It applies as soon as you buy or sell, and a move between your own addresses does not trigger it. Take the cheap fee environment as an occasion to swap, however, and you pay it in full.

The third is the choice of network. Where an exchange offers withdrawals over several networks, the costs differ considerably. What decides the matter is not the cheapest price but whether your destination address supports the chosen network at all. A withdrawal into a network the receiving side does not know is the most common way to lose funds for good.

Levels above and below: $2,637, $2,734 and the high at $2,807

For the price side, the past ten trading days supply three reference points, and all three can be derived from the daily data rather than from an expectation.

Below, the first level is $2,637, the low of the past 24 hours. Beneath it comes $2,628, the low of September 24 and thus the lowest point since the rise of September 21. If the price falls through it, the bracket of the past six days is broken, and the next stop would not come until the September 20 low at $2,563.

Above, the first hurdle is the daily high at $2,734, followed by the September 23 high at $2,788. Over that stands the September 21 high at $2,807, which has not been reached for a good week and marks the upper edge of the current range.

These points are observations from the daily data and not a forecast. A narrow range over several days says nothing about the direction in which it eventually resolves; it says only that the resolution is still outstanding. How the picture looks over longer periods shows in the comparison with the previous week: the range from September 20 to September 29 ran from $2,563 to $2,807 and is thus a good five times as wide as that of the past six daily closes.

Ethereum price and network fee: how to proceed now

From this day's numbers follow three steps you can work through in order.

1. Review your holdings and read the withdrawal fee. Look at which part of your funds sits on trading venues although you do not trade it there, and read in your account what each withdrawal costs. Only that number next to the six cents of network fee gives the real price of the move. The terms offered by the providers available in Europe are in our overview of crypto exchanges.
2. Settle the custody question before the first transfer runs. Clarify in advance where the funds are going and how the recovery phrase will be kept. A test amount of a few euros currently costs six cents on the network side and answers the question of whether the destination address is right. If a dedicated device is not an option, you will find the alternatives in our overview of software wallets.
3. Look at staking commitments before you move anything. Funds tied up in staking cannot be moved without further ado, and the waiting time on exit has nothing to do with the gas fee. Clarify your provider's notice and payout periods before you plan a movement. A side-by-side of the terms is available at the staking providers.

(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)