Crypto glossary
Gas war
A gas war is a bidding frenzy in which users raise transaction fees to beat each other into a block, typically during a scarce NFT mint or token launch.
When a limited mint opens at a fixed time and demand far exceeds supply, being included early in a block decides who gets a token. Users and bots bump their priority fees higher and higher, and block producers order transactions by what they pay. Fees for everyone on the network rise sharply, even for people doing ordinary transfers.
The most notorious gas wars happened on Ethereum in 2021 and 2022. When a major metaverse land sale launched in April 2022, users spent tens of millions of dollars in fees within hours and the network was congested for everyone. Many transactions failed because the supply ran out before they executed, but still paid for the gas they had used.
Gas wars transfer value from buyers to validators and favour bots and wealthy participants. Projects responded with Dutch auctions, allowlists, raffles and mints spread over longer periods, and wallets learned to simulate transactions to avoid paying for failures. The same dynamic appears in memecoin launches on fast chains, where sniping bots pay high priority fees to buy first.
Example
A user sets a 200 gwei priority fee to mint a hyped NFT; the collection sells out two blocks earlier, the mint call reverts and the user still pays about $90 in gas for nothing.