Ethereum gas fees, confirmations and transfers

What pays the fee

Every Ethereum transaction is paid for in ETH. Holding a token on Ethereum is not enough to move it: the account also needs an ETH balance to cover gas. This is the single most common reason a transfer cannot be sent, and it is covered in detail in why you need ETH to send USDC.

The cost is gas units multiplied by the price per unit. Gas units reflect how much work the transaction performs, so a plain ETH transfer costs less than a token transfer, which costs less than a complex contract interaction. The price per unit has two parts: a base fee that the protocol sets from recent demand and destroys, and a priority fee that goes to the validator that includes your transaction.

Because the base fee moves with demand, the same transfer can cost several times more at a busy moment than a quiet one. A wallet quote is an estimate at the moment you look at it.

How long a transfer takes

Blocks are produced roughly every twelve seconds, so a transaction with a competitive fee is usually included within a block or two. Inclusion is not the same as settlement: Ethereum finalises in epochs, and a transaction is generally considered final after two epochs, on the order of thirteen minutes.

Exchanges apply their own confirmation requirements on top of that before crediting a deposit, and those requirements differ by platform and by asset. A transaction that is visible on a block explorer may still be uncredited in an account for some time. How long a crypto transfer takes covers the difference.

Token versions on Ethereum

Ethereum carries the native, issuer-deployed versions of most major stablecoins, including Circle’s USDC and Tether’s ERC-20 USD₮. Because tokens are commonly bridged from Ethereum rather than to it, the bridged-versus-native distinction that complicates layer 2s is less of an issue here.

It is still worth reading the contract address rather than the ticker. Any token can use any symbol, and a symbol collision on a decentralised exchange is not an error condition — it is just two contracts with the same name.

When Ethereum is and is not the right choice

Ethereum makes sense when the recipient only accepts Ethereum, when the amount is large enough that the fee is immaterial as a percentage, or when you specifically want assets on the settlement layer. For small transfers, the fee can be a significant share of the amount, and a layer 2 that the recipient also accepts will usually cost less.

The comparison that matters is not "which network is cheapest" in the abstract but "which of the networks my recipient accepts is cheapest right now". Choosing the cheapest network works through that.