NFT Gas Fee: What It Is & How to Calculate It

Interest in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and crypto collectibles peaked considerably following the sale of a digital image collage entitled "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" at Christie's, the famous auction house, for a record-breaking $69.3 million. The NFT, created by Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist popularly known as Beeple, set a new record for a digital-only artwork and became the third most expensive artwork by a living artist to be sold at an auction. 

The ensuing popularity of NFTs attracted flocks of creators and artists who see blockchain-based technology as a means of monetizing their talents. Of course, the NFT market quickly proliferated, and thousands of digital files exchanged hands daily. Nevertheless, buying, selling and transferring NFTs typically comes with a transaction cost — namely, gas fees. 

If you’d like to trade NFTs, you may wonder what NFT gas fees are and why they’re necessary. This article will help you understand how NFT gas fees work, why fees are required, and how to calculate them. 

What Is a Gas Fee?

A gas fee is the charge that users pay to transact on the Ethereum blockchain. Gas is used to compensate miners for the computing energy and resources expended to validate transactions and to include them in the blockchain. In other words, gas fees are a reflection of the amount of computational power required to record a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain network.