Why are my gas fees so high?

The Ethereum network requires gas to execute transactions. When
you send tokens, interact with a contract, send ETH, or do anything else on the blockchain, you must
pay for that computation. That payment is calculated in gas, and gas is always paid in ETH. (Other
networks that use gas, or have a similar model, usually pay gas in their native token: e.g. BNB, POL
(previously MATIC), etc.)

Okay, yes, I get that, but why are they so high?​

The price of gas is dynamic and is essentially a product of demand: the more people that are trying
to get their transactions processed by the network, the higher it will be. Each additional person
can—if they have the means—increase their priority fee to raise the chances that their transaction
will get processed sooner.

In addition to being under the sway of demand, one of the reasons Ethereum can be costly to
transact on is because of its security. In a way, security is the feature for which you’re paying
a premium. Ethereum’s high level of security is a product of its age (it has weathered a lot more
challenges and attacks than most blockchains) and its distributed, decentralized nature. Ethereum
is, as a rule, far more decentralized than many other blockchains, and although many alternatives
have much cheaper transactions, they are likely to have compromised on the’security’ element of the
blockchain trilemma (although
many claim to have solved this challenge).

Some other contributors to the price of Ethereum’s gas fees include:

• The popularity of NFTs on Ethereum. Many spikes in gas prices can be attributed to highly
  anticipated NFT drops.
• Ethereum is the home of DeFi (decentralized finance). Many of the largest, most established
  dapps were built on Ethereum, and continue to be the biggest players in DeFi. This
  DeFiLlama chart, comparing TVL (total value locked) in DeFi across
  major networks, shows Ethereum comprises ~58% of the DeFi market at the time of writing. All the
  transactions that accompany this popularity naturally raise computational demands on the network.

Is there anything I can do about it?​

You are paying for the computation of your transaction, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails.
Even if it fails, the validators must confirm and execute your transaction, which takes
computational power. You must pay for that computation, just like you would pay for a successful
transaction. This means there’s no way around paying gas fees if you want to use a network.

However, if you have a bit of time and flexibility, you may be able to reduce costs:

• You can try to lower gas fees in your
  transaction settings. Please keep in
  mind that overriding MetaMask’s suggested gas settings with a much lower total will result in your
  transaction being processed very slowly, and could even result in you wasting your money if it
  becomes’stale’ and isn’t picked up at all.
• Develop an understanding of peak times. Although crypto is global, peaks will typically be
  during the waking hours of the North American continent (between UTC-5 and UTC-8), which you could
  plan to avoid.
• Investigate alternative networks. You can use MetaMask to take advantage of the multi-chain
  web3 that is emerging. Whether you stay directly within Ethereum’s orbit on
  layer 2s, or emigrate to one of many
  EVM-compatible chains, there are cheaper alternatives (though you will have to
  bridge tokens to them first).

For current network gas conditions, see
https://etherscan.io/gastracker.