Markets
Ethereum gas prints 0.07 gwei
On Oct. 10 Owlracle priced a typical transaction near 2 cents. A plain transfer costs less than that.
Owlracle's Ethereum gas reading at 3:15 p.m. Eastern on October 10, 2026 put the base fee near 0.07 gwei. The base fee is the protocol's price for block space. It moves with how full recent blocks were. It is not a tip a sender adds, and it is not a dollar amount until it is multiplied by the gas a given transaction uses.
The four speeds on that reading are a range, not one number. The base fee runs from 0.066 gwei on the slowest listed speed to 0.083 gwei on the line marked for certain inclusion. The priority fee, the tip, stays under 0.01 gwei on the two slower speeds and near 0.023 gwei on the fast one. Only the certain-inclusion line jumps, to a priority fee near 0.98 gwei. The cheap print is the ordinary path. The expensive one is the price of cutting in.
A gwei is one-billionth of one ETH. At a base fee near 0.07, one unit of gas is a very small slice of a dollar. Owlracle turns that into a fee by using its own average transaction, about 122,000 gas, rather than the 21,000 gas a plain ETH send consumes. On that average the estimate is $0.022 on the slowest speed, $0.024 in the middle, and $0.030 on the fast speed. The certain-inclusion estimate is $0.33. A 21,000-gas transfer is about one-sixth of the average, so the same base fee puts a plain send under half a cent. The figure people will repeat, about 2 cents, is the typical recent transaction. It is not the smallest thing a wallet can do.
The chain is not sitting idle while the price is low. The same Owlracle snapshot puts the average near 249 transactions and the block time near 12 seconds. A quiet chain can be cheap because nobody wants the space. This reading is the other case. Blocks are still being filled on a normal cadence, and the protocol price is still near 0.07 gwei.
DefiLlama's dollar total for Ethereum chain fees tells the same story, and October 10 is not a finished day. Through this afternoon the October 10 bar is $307,160. October 9 closed at $380,530. October 8 was $954,813, October 7 was $832,994, and October 6 was $711,313. The break came on October 9. October 10 is running in that lower band, with hours left before the UTC day ends. The page's one-day change, about 68 percent, matches the drop from October 8's $955,000 to the latest $307,000. It does not describe a drop from yesterday. Yesterday was already the cheap day.
The seven-day total on that page is $4,257,964. Split across seven days, that is about $608,000 a day, and the split is this desk's arithmetic, not a number DefiLlama prints. October 6, 7, and 8 sat above it. October 9 and the unfinished October 10 sit below it.
Builders are who this print is for. A call that costs a few cents on mainnet is a different product from one that costs a few dollars. Layer 2 networks were built for the expensive version, doing the work on a cheaper chain and settling back to Ethereum. On a day like this the fee gap is thin. What a layer 2 is is here: https://cryptokeymedia.com/news/what-is-a-layer-2
The snapshot does not say how long the price holds. The base fee rises when blocks come in above the target and falls when they come in under it. A reading at 3:15 p.m. is not a quote for the evening, and it is not a quote for a transaction that uses more than 122,000 gas. A swap, a mint, or a contract deploy can be several times that average. The rate is the news. The bill is the rate times the work.
What comes next is the finished October 10 bar. DefiLlama's day closes at midnight UTC, which is 8 p.m. Eastern. If that bar stays near the $307,000 already printed, or near yesterday's $381,000, the cheap stretch that started October 9 lasted a second day. If it climbs back toward the $711,000 to $955,000 prints from October 6 through October 8, this afternoon was a window. Until that bar closes, the figure to keep is Owlracle's: a base fee near 0.07 gwei, about 2 to 3 cents for a typical transaction, and less than a cent for a plain transfer.