[SERIOUS] How to save gas fees on your Ethereum L1 transactions, if you are ok to have them run with a delay

So lately there have been lots of posts about the ethereum L1 gas fees being high. Aside from the usage of proper L2s (which is what the ethereum community actually recommends; see https://l2beat.com), there another thing you can do to save gas fees.

Did you know, that you can actually have your transactions automatically run at a cheaper price by having it wait for lower gas fees? (e.g. during US night time)

Take a look at the first chart here: https://ethereumprice.org/gas

You can see, that the gas prices fluctuate quite a bit during network activity. Usually it's more regular day night cycles, but because of some tokens being popular in the past few days the fluctuations are even higher.

Now, you can actually do the following for your L1 transactions. When you make an NFTs opensea sale for instance, the gas price of currently 100gwei would cost around 14$. This is expensive, but did you know, that you can also make the same sale for just under 4$?

All you need to do is to tell to your wallet, that you want to set a custom gas fee and have it execute at 30gwei. Here is an article show how to do that with Metamask. Essentially, if you set the Max Gas Fee to a lower value like 30gwei, the network will keep your transaction in the pool and automatically run it, when the gas fee reaches 30gwei (or lower). This is great! This means, you don't need to wake up at uncommon times just to send your cheap transactions. You can let the network do it for you!

But how do you know, which lower gas limit to set? That's why we need the above charts. You can take a look at the last few price dips (usually at US night) and use that's as an estimate. The longer you are willing to wait, the cheaper you can have your transactions. Essentially, it's just like those limit orders on order book exchanges.

Here is an example of me adding Liquidity to a uniswap pool for the cheap gas fee of below 20gwei. Back then the median gas price was much higher, but I was willing to wait:

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x4afa63e62e7d0909bca9cc858ceb2b2ad9df474555ac5fca49d17485512c546d

Caveats:

• While your transactions is waiting in the tx pool, you cannot make another tx to be executed immediately. Your transactions have to be sequential, since your nonce is increased one by one for each tx. This means, that if you have a transaction waiting for a low gas fee, you can make new transactions to run after that, but they will have to wait, until the previous one is done.
• If the gas price never goes low enough, you can cancel or speedup the tx with a higher gas fee. Metamask shows this option in the UI natively.
• For some things like high frequency trading, this doesn't make sense. But if you can afford to wait, it's worth it!

Alright then! Hope you learned something new today! Now go on and save your gas fees! ????