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Since Day 1, one of SKALE’s most innovative features has been zero gas fees. Over the years, the developer ecosystem has continued to evolve and we now have a number of incredible technical options when it comes to having (or not) gas fees. This page breaks down the various options and trade offs for businesses and developers looking to adopt SKALE.

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Zero Gas Fees with sFUEL

The original implementation of zero gas fees — activley in use across many SKALE Chains on Ethereum — is a unique gas structure where there is a gas token for compatibility but it by default has no value (i.e valueless gas). sFUEL allows the SKALE Chain to maintain 100% EVM compatiblity with popular tools and wallets while making it simple to scale usage for high performance applications. sFUEL is technically equivalent to ETH on Ethereum but is pre-minted with a massive surplus and is constantly recycled back into a contract allowing redistribution. This is by design ensuring that the supply of sFUEL for the chain operators should never run out.
Developers and users can acquire sFUEL on the SKALE Hubs from https://sfuelstation.com

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Zero Gas Fees with Compute Credits

A new model put into place as part of SKALE Expand, compute credits are philisophically designed to help simplify the cost of compute for developers in a blockchain. Technically, compute credits are very similar to sFUEL, however with some small nuances:
  1. Compute credits are directly purchasable, while sFUEL is not
  2. The cost of compute credits can be dynamic over time, however aims to be as stable as possible to represent the flat cost of compute
  3. The ability to acquire compute credits as needed allows for more open-ecosystems

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Gasless Transactions with Proof-of-Work

Gasless transactions utilize the proof-of-work scheme — an algorithm designed to find a magic number to satisfy some equation — which can then be used to send transactions without having any sFUEL in the wallet.
Proof-of-Work is disabled by default on credit chains.

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Gas Chains

A gas chain is simple and acts similarly to a Layer 2 in setup. The team launching the chain can chose a token available on the network the sChain is being launched from i.e Ethereum or Base and have that token — SKL, ETH, WBTC, custom ERC-20, etc — be chosen as the gas token on the SKALE Chain. During setup, the gas asset on the sChain then has a dynamic supply based on the bridged in asset.