Introduction

Introduction to near

A simple way to think about NEAR is as a cloud-based infrastructure, as the ones currently available from major tech companies. However, instead of being controlled by a single entity, the NEAR cloud is supported by independent people running their own infrastructure around the world.

So, instead of a company-operated cloud, NEAR is a community-operated cloud.

Introduction to gas

When you make calls to the NEAR blockchain to update or change data, the people running the infrastructure of the blockchain incur some cost. At the end of the day, some computers somewhere process your request, and the validators running these computers spend significant capital to keep these computers running. Like other programmable blockchains, NEAR compensates these people by charging transaction fees, also called gas fees.

NEAR has a more-or-less one second block time, accomplished by limiting the amount of gas per block. The gas units have been carefully calculated to work out to some easy-to-think-in numbers:

• 10¹² gas units, or 1 TGas (TeraGas)...
• ≈ 1 millisecond of "compute" time
• ...which, at a minimum gas price of 100 million yoctoNEAR, equals a 0.1 milliNEAR charge

Reference

Objective

What contracts are users spending the most gas on to use? How has this changed over the past week? Past month?

Tables used

For the analysis we use the following flipside tables,

1. flipside_prod_db.mdao_near.transactions - to determine the amount of gas used
2. flipside_prod_db.mdao_near.actions_events_function_call

We use the flipside_prod_db.mdao_near.actions_events_function_call to identify transactions that interact with contracts.

flipside_prod_db.mdao_near.actions_events_function_call

flipside_prod_db.mdao_near.actions_events_function_call

Analysis

We start by looking at the top 10 gas users.

We see that aurora, a second layer solution on near consumes the highest gas, while the near app, app.nearcrowd.near is in second place.

However, the third is a bridge and the fourth is marketplace.paras.near which is an NFT marketplace on near.

It appears that there are contracts that spend a very high amount of gas. These include terraspace and a bsc bridge.

trend of gas usage

We see that aurora is consistently a gas guzzler and it showed a considerable activity in the last month which might be because NEAR Foundation partnered with crypto custodian BitGo. Referece

It also appears that the amount of gas consumed by aurora was very high during the defi summer phase.