Gas Fees
Somnia's gas pricing model is designed to balance affordability, predictability, security and sustainability, ensuring an optimal experience for users and developers. Gas fees help prevent network congestion and malicious attacks, compensate validators, efficiently allocate resources and incentivise developers to build within the ecosystem. Users pay fees in SOMI tokens, aligning with network economics and long-term viability.
Somnia's model was built based on Ethereum. Most Operation Codes remain the same, however, some required adjustment for two key reasons. First, storage-related opcodes needed to be right-sized since Somnia’s unit gas fees are significantly lower than Ethereum’s, preventing disproportionately cheap storage costs. Second, certain opcodes had gas prices misaligned with the actual compute resources required to execute them, requiring recalibration to maintain a balanced and secure execution environment.
Pricing Model
Somnia’s model follows Ethereum’s structure: Total Fee = Gas Usage x Gas Unit Price
Gas Usage
Total gas units consumed by a transaction, determined by the following formula:
Gas Usage = Base Gas + Transaction Data + Opcodes
Base Gas: All EOA transactions will be subject to a base gas fee of 21,000. This is denoted as a Gtransaction and is, in practice, the cheapest possible transaction cost on the Somnia Network.
Transaction Data: Any additional data that is included in a transaction apart from the recipient address, value to be sent and gas parameters is included in this field. Similar to ETH, data is stored in blocks of 32 bytes. Zero-byte and non-zero-byte data costs 160 gas.
Opcodes: Operations that can be executed on Smart Contracts. The full Opcodes table can be found here.
Gas Unit Price: The price per gas unit, dynamically adjusted based on account consumption.
Somnia applies a dynamic discount curve for applications that achieve higher transaction volumes. As transaction throughput increases, the effective cost per gas unit decreases, incentivizing developers to scale their applications within the ecosystem.
Dynamic Pricing & Discounts
Somnia’s compute gas pricing scales with transaction volume:
Base Price: $0.00000000616 per gas unit.
Min gas price: $0.000000000616 per gas unit (at 400 TPS).
Volume Discounts: Gas unit price decreases up to 90% for high-TPS applications.
Step function, decreasing at 0.1, 1, 10, 100 and 400 TPS
Sustained low price from 400 TPS
Measurement timeframe: average TPS in 1 hour.
P(T) = price per transaction after discount
P0 = initial (base) price per transaction
T = account cumulative transactions in 1 hour
Storage Fees (Single STORE - 32 Bytes)
Somnia introduces the concept of transient state. This means that a developer can choose not to store data permanently on Somnia. This was explicitly introduced for entertainment products which have a lot of transient states, for instance, the position of a player in a video game.
Transient & Permanent Storage: Users choose between temporary and permanent storage.
Tiered Pricing: Costs scale with duration (e.g., 90% discount for 1-hour storage, no discount for indefinite storage).
Create SSTORE (32 bytes)
Gas Amount
1 hour
20,000
1 day
40,000
1 month
60,000
1 year
80,000
Indefinite
200,000
TPS Level
Gas Price ($)
Cost Min Ops (21k)
Discount vs Base (%)
0.0
$5.49E-09
$0.00012
0%
0.1
$4.39E-09
$0.00009
20%
1.0
$3.29E-09
$0.00007
40%
10.0
$2.20E-09
$0.00005
60%
100.0
$1.10E-09
$0.00002
80%
400.0
$5.49E-10
$0.00001
90%
Price Increase Function
To ensure smooth network operation, validators can adjust the base fee price through voting, based on block execution time. This dynamically links gas prices to real network utilisation, increasing the base fee as the network gets congested.
If a block takes longer than 95ms to execute, validators can vote to double the base fee. If execution is faster than 95ms, they can vote to halve it. However, the base fee cannot fall below the minimum of 21,000 gas. Voting cycles occur every second (10 blocks). Here are the key implementation details:
Price Adjustment Threshold: 95ms.
Price Increase / Decrease: 2x increase, 50% decrease
Minimum Base Fee: 21k
Voting Cycle: 1 sec / 10 blocks
Gas fee distribution
Gas fees spent to use the network are partially distributed to the validators and partially burnt.
50% of all fees are distributed to all validators. This is distributed based on the amount of tokens a validator has staked. It is distributed if the validator was in the working set for the whole epoch.
50% of all fees are burnt. This means the Somnia token is deflationary, as the network is used more, the total supply will decrease.
Additional Features
Tipping: Not included initially due to high network efficiency; may be introduced later.
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