With Bancor, users perform token conversions against smart contracts directly on the Ethereum blockchain. This requires computing transactions on the blockchain and registering the result in the public ledger, which incurs gas fees.
The gas price set by Bancor is the optimal price for a transaction to successfully execute on the Ethereum within seconds to minutes. The calculated gas price is part of the transaction’s hard coded values. Thus, changing the gas price might cause the transaction to fail.
Possible fees users might pay can be broken down into three different aspects:
Ethereum network gas fees
Gas costs that are related to any user interaction with smart contracts on the Ethereum main network, which Bancor is built on.
This applies to both deposits, withdrawals or any other action such as staking in a rewards contract or migrating, and varies based on ETH's network congestion or lack of.
Trading fees
Each token pool have it's own fee, determined by the Bancor DAO that traders pay when they are executing a swap, which goes back to the liquidity providers.
The fees associated with depositing and withdrawing depend on the blockchain network activity. A congested network means that gas costs will be higher. We suggest checking previous deposits as a reference via our Telegram Bancor Alerts channel and keeping an eye on Etherscan's tracker or gwei.at for periods of low gas costs. A congested network means that gas costs will be higher.
