How Gas Fees Work in FailSafe

Safeguarding your assets against malicious attacks requires FailSafe to spend gas fees on transactions that intercept such attacks directed at your wallet. Gas fees vary across different blockchains, and this guide will provide all the necessary information.

What are Gas Fees?

Gas fees on the blockchain are essentially the costs associated with conducting transactions. These fees are paid in a blockchain’s native token currency; for instance gas fees on Ethereum are paid in (ETH), or more specifically, in a smaller unit called gwei, while gas fees on Polygon are paid in MATIC. The purpose of these fees is to compensate the validators—those individuals or entities who contribute to the upkeep and security of the Ethereum network. Validators are crucial because they verify and add new transactions to the blockchain, ensuring the network remains robust and secure.

The cost of gas fees can vary significantly, influenced by several factors including how busy the network is, the demand for processing transactions, and the overall capacity of the system. During times when a lot of people are using the network simultaneously, these fees can spike. This happens because the network has a reduced capacity for processing transactions per second, leading to a sort of bidding war over who gets their transactions processed first. In simpler terms, the busier the network, the higher the cost to ensure your transaction is processed in a timely manner.

How Does FailSafe Use Gas Fees?

Gas fees play a critical role in executing time-sensitive transactions on the blockchain. When a transaction needs to be processed quickly, such as during a malicious transaction’s interception where timing could significantly affect the transaction’s financial outcome, the amount of gas you are required to pay becomes particularly important. This is because the network processes transactions based on the gas fee attached to them; transactions with higher fees get priority over those with lower fees. This system ensures that users who need faster processing can get it by paying more.

When FailSafe detects a malicious transaction targeting your wallet, the smart contract executes a transaction to front-run the cyberattack and sweep endangered assets to the safety of a Recovery Vault. In such cases, having enough tokens to afford higher gas fees can be the difference between a transaction being executed within the desired time frame or getting delayed.

Although FailSafe’s smart contracts are optimized to use the least amount of tokens for gas fees in any given scenario, we strongly recommend having enough to cover the interception and recovery transactions. A minimum threshold for gas fees is hard-coded into FailSafe, without which it will not be possible to activate asset protection on your dashboard. This threshold varies across different networks.

• Ethereum: ~0.03 ETH
• BNB Chain: at least $5 in BNB tokens
• Polygon: at least $5 in MATIC tokens

Gas Fees are not platform fees for using FailSafe. All tokens are spent directly on the blockchain.

Easy Protect

Using the ‘Easy Protect’ feature, FailSafe can protect your crypto assets without requiring you to pay gas fees upfront. When a potential threat is detected, FailSafe covers the gas fee to block the malicious transaction, and then immediately gets reimbursed in the same transaction, meaning you only pay if an attack is actually thwarted.

‘Easy Protect’ works when protecting high-liquidity ERC20 tokens, such as USDC and WETH. This allows for seamless operability of the gas refund system. Learn more about this feature here.

Fight back against scammers and crypto thieves by protecting your assets now.