2026/04/30 by Irene Aldridge, Gavhar Annaeva, Leyla Beriker +21
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #econ.EM #q-fin.TR
8 pages
arxiv created 2026/07/30 · arxiv updated 2026/07/31
Ethereum's EIP-1559 fee mechanism was designed under the assumption of homogeneous, myopic agents responding to a single congestion signal. We examine how this assumption interacts with the heterogeneous demand structure of real-world Ethereum users. Analyzing 62,142 confirmed transactions from seven operational firms across seven industries (January--March 2026), we document significant intraday gas-fee variation: fees peak at hour~12 UTC (7 AM ET, β12=$0.054 above the U.S. evening baseline, p<0.001) and are associated with periods of elevated speculative-arbitrage activity. Operational firms exhibit heterogeneous scheduling responses moderated by transaction deferrability and gas intensity. Residual cost floors, i.e. the gap between observed expenditure and the counterfactual under perfect off-peak scheduling, range from 40.7% to 92.5% of actual expenditure, and persist even during the lowest-cost hours (h∈\20,21,22,23\ UTC, 3--6 PM ET). We introduce an On-Chain Scheduling Matrix that maps firms to four scheduling regimes as a practical framework for managing gas-fee exposure under the current mechanism.