Build on a Low Gas Fee Blockchain

It depends on whether you’re looking at independently measured figures or published specifications. Among chains independently measured on chainspect.app as of August 31, 2026, Solana had the lowest confirmed average fee at around $0.0049, with Polygon close behind at around $0.013. QIE publishes an average fee of $0.0001, which would be lower than both, but that figure comes from QIE’s own documentation rather than independent, third-party monitoring, since QIE is not yet tracked by the same services. Treat any single "lowest fee" claim, including this one, as a snapshot that can shift as networks and monitoring coverage change.

Ethereum prices transaction space through an auction: block space is limited, and when demand for that space rises, users bid higher fees to get their transaction included sooner. During periods of high network activity, that competition pushes the average fee up. Ethereum's own current independently measured average sits around $0.17 per transaction, and that number climbs further during congestion, which is often exactly when users most need their transaction to go through quickly.

A few practical levers: batch multiple operations into a single transaction instead of sending several, optimize your contract's storage writes since those are typically the most expensive operation, use gas estimation tools before deploying to catch inefficient code, and consider whether a lower-fee EVM-compatible chain fits your application before you've hardcoded assumptions around Ethereum-level costs. Switching networks doesn't require rewriting your Solidity contracts, only reconfiguring where you deploy them.

A gasless transaction is one where the end user doesn't directly pay the network fee themselves, typically because the app sponsors it through a relayer or meta-transaction system that pays the fee on the user's behalf. The fee doesn't disappear, it's just shifted to whoever is subsidizing it. This is different from a low-cost transaction, where the user still pays the fee directly, but the fee itself is small enough to barely register, which is the model QIE's fee structure is built around.

QIE runs Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus on Tendermint Core, which is built for high throughput and doesn’t rely on the kind of competitive gas auctions that drive fees up on congested networks. On top of that, QIE burns 80% of every gas fee rather than paying it out in full, which keeps the fee structure lean as network usage grows instead of scaling fees up with demand the way an auction-based model does.

True zero-fee blockchains are rare, and most that market themselves that way still have some cost, it's just shifted rather than eliminated, for example through sponsored transactions, staking-based fee allowances, or subsidies that need to be funded somehow. QIE does not claim zero fees. Its published average fee is $0.0001 per transaction, which is near-zero rather than literally zero, and that fee is paid directly rather than hidden in another mechanism.

In a burn mechanism, a portion of every transaction fee is permanently removed from circulating supply instead of being paid out to validators or miners in full. On QIE, 80% of every gas fee is burned this way. The practical effect is that fees don’t purely accumulate as validator revenue that scales with network usage, which is part of how QIE keeps its published average fee at $0.0001 even as transaction volume grows.