Fee Market
Canonical reference · Estimated read time: 7 minutes
TL;DR
Valdium uses an a base-fee + priority-tip-style fee market. Every transaction pays a base fee (50% burned, 50% to the block proposer) plus an optional priority tip to the proposer. The base fee adjusts automatically each block based on how full blocks are. Gas is priced in VLD. For simple transfers, fees are fractional VLD and typically negligible.
The fee model
Every transaction on Valdium pays a fee composed of two parts:
- Base fee — set by the protocol per block. 50% is burned (removed from supply); 50% is paid to the block proposer and their delegators, split by stake share. Not adjustable by the sender.
- Priority tip — optional additional payment to the block proposer, set by the sender. Higher tips get prioritised in the mempool during congestion.
Total transaction cost: (base_fee + priority_tip) × gas_used
Base fee
The base fee adjusts each block in response to the previous block's fullness:
- If the previous block was more than 50% full, the base fee increases by up to 12.5%.
- If the previous block was less than 50% full, the base fee decreases by up to 12.5%.
- Target: 50% block utilisation at steady state.
The base fee is encoded in the block header and is known before the block is full. Wallets read the latest block header and quote the current base fee automatically.
Priority tip
The priority tip is paid to the block proposer on top of their block reward. In practice, most transactions can leave this at 0 — the base fee alone is sufficient to get into the next available block during normal network conditions.
During periods of high demand (e.g. a popular contract launch), higher priority tips get transactions included first. Wallets surface this as a "fast / standard / slow" selector.
The burn
50% of the base fee is burned: that portion of VLD is permanently removed from circulating supply. This creates deflationary pressure proportional to chain activity — as usage grows, the burn grows, and the fixed 1B supply contracts. The remaining 50% of the base fee is paid to the block proposer and their delegators as protocol-level validator income. The priority tip is not burned; it goes 100% to the proposer.
There is no separate inflation or emission funding validators — the 50% proposer share of base fees, plus priority tips, is the entire validator income stream. The fee economy is the security budget.
Gas limits
| Operation | Gas cost |
|---|---|
| Simple VLD transfer | 21,000 gas |
| Contract call (base) | 21,000 + execution cost |
| Contract deployment | 32,000 + source-size cost |
| Storage write (new key) | 20,000 gas |
| Storage write (existing key) | 5,000 gas |
| Storage read | 800 gas |
The block gas limit is 30,000,000 gas. At current base fees, a full block costs on the order of a few VLD in total fees — very low compared to Ethereum. This is by design: Valdium is optimised for accessible participation, not fee extraction.
Estimating fees
Use eth_estimateGas to estimate the gas your transaction will use. Then multiply by the current base fee (from eth_getBlockByNumber("latest")) to get the expected cost. The SDK exposes valdium.estimateFee(tx) as a convenience wrapper that returns the total fee in VLD.