Why gas prices move constantly
Gas price is what you pay per unit of computation on a chain, and it floats with demand — more people trying to transact at once means the price to get included in the next block rises, then falls again as demand eases. On most EVM chains today it’s expressed in Gwei (10-9 of the native token), and it can swing meaningfully within minutes during a busy mint, a volatile market, or a popular new launch.
How the estimates are built
Total transaction cost is gas price × gas used. Gas price is read live from each chain; gas used depends on exactly what the transaction does, so the table uses typical, widely-cited limits for common actions — 21,000 for a plain native-token transfer, more for an ERC-20 transfer, a DEX swap, or an NFT mint, since each touches more contract logic. These are useful ballparks for comparing chains, not a quote for your specific transaction.
Reading gas across chains
Gas price alone doesn’t tell the whole story — a chain with a higher Gwei number but a lower-value native token can still be cheaper in absolute terms. That’s why every figure here is also converted into an estimated cost in each chain’s native token, so you can compare like for like before deciding where to transact.