With falling DRIP prices, gas fees become more important, as they make out a larger percentage of your total. Who cares about a $0.5 gas fee if you are hydrating one DRIP at $100? But these days, with DRIP currently at around $0.85, you would probably think twice about hydrating a single DRIP, as gas fees for a single transaction are coming close to the value of one DRIP.
For most people, especially those with smaller bags, this means hydrating less often. But what if there was a way to significantly reduce the gas fees for a single transaction?
In fact, there is, and it involves something called RPCs.
What is an RPC?
RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call. They enable communication between an app on your device (such as Metamask) and the blockchain.
In theory, you could probably run an RPC yourself, but in practice, it involves running software that requires a certain amount of capacity, up-time, load-balancing, and all that stuff that tends to be better run by professionals than end users. Of course, these resources cost money, and that's where the gas fees come into play. The RPC operators dictate or influence the gas fees for transactions sent through their nodes, which is how choosing an RPC operator can have a big impact on the gas fees you pay.
How to set up an RPC?
From Metamask, it is now possible to set up "networks" by clicking "Add network" and then selecting the wanted network from a list. By doing this Metamask will make the necessary changes, including the RPC setup, to support that network from within Metamask.
But if your network is not on the list, or if you want to use other values than those provided by the standard configurations suggested by Metamask, you will have to choose "Add a network manually" and provide the values yourself. It is not so long ago this was the standard procedure in Metamask as well.
Binance has its own server for the BSC network, which is the one you will get if you select the BNB Smart Chain network in Metamask. The address is https://bsc-dataseed.binance.org/. I have found the cost of this to be somewhere around $0.5 per transaction, sometimes more, sometimes less.
A word on risk
Before you go and try to find a cheaper RPC, it is important to evaluate the risk involved. Metamask does not validate or approve custom RPCs, so it is completely up to you to evaluate the risk of a given RPC. Choosing an RPC from a rogue or malignant actor can lead to exploits and loss of funds.
Metamask has an article that describes how to verify a custom network. They give a few tips:
Keep in mind that there are many scams out there
Check out the network's website. Does it look professional and legitimate? Also, does it provide the network details?
Does the network have a social media account? Do they have a lot of followers? What are people saying about them?
Are there news articles about the network?
In essence, it involves vetting the network the same way that you would vet any dapp before trusting them with money.
They also recommend you to go to chainlist.org who attempts to make a rough validation of some RPC server addresses. Do not rely on this information alone! Please make your own research and keep safe.
One of the servers promoted by several YT content creators is the one from ankr.com - https://rpc.ankr.com/bsc. A quick check of their website gives me a solid and professional impression, but please don't take my word for it.
It is also interesting to notice that the Chainlist table has a privacy column where there is sometimes a yellow or red icon. For ankr it says:
For service delivery purposes, we temporarily record IP addresses to set usage limits and monitor for denial of service attacks against our infrastructure.
They also go on about how they only look at high-level data, do not store it for a long time, etc. In the end, we can only take their word for it, and for all we know they could monitor their user's every move and sell the data to the highest bidder.
Although ankr's yellow icon might indicate security logging that is completely legit, there are others with red icons that seem much fishier. For example this one from nodereal.io:
They basically admit monitoring and analyzing all kinds of data about their users, including IP address, device and browser, operating system, and more. Personally, I would think twice about using such a service.
Adding a custom RPC
But let's say you have found an alternative RPC you want to use, and you want to add that to your Metamask. You could choose "Add network manually" and fill in all the details, but an easier way is to use the connect function in the chainlist.org site:
Clicking this will pop up some Metamask dialogs to approve the network. Just accept them, and you are good to go. You now have a new network in Metamask that you can select.
The next step is to change the minimum gas fee when you are making a transaction, e.g. hydrating your DRIP. What you need to do is to click the EDIT button in the transaction window.
This will pop up a window with a gas limit and a gas price. Do not change the gas limit! This will cause the transaction to fail. Instead, change the gas price from the default value of 5 to either 1 or 2. Using 1 will give you the cheapest gas fee, but it will also cause the transaction to take longer to complete. 1 may not work for all networks but has been reported to work for ankr.
Press save and complete the transaction. Most likely, you will see a reduction in gas fees of 80-90% compared to what it costs with the default RPC.
Disclaimer
I have not actually tried this myself, for the reasons of privacy and security. I am considering doing it for one of my smaller accounts, where the risk is less, but for now, I have opted for the safe route which is to use the default Binance RPC and simply hydrate less often. This is an ongoing evaluation, and I might end up changing RPC later, especially as the DRIP price gets lower, and people report that e.g. the ankr RPC seems to be trustworthy. It's up to you to find the best solution for your situation.
In any case, stay calm and hydrate on!
A bit shoutout to my favorite YT content creator DRIP Coach for providing lots of background information for this post. Check out his video below!
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