Why do on-chain operations require payment?
Whenever you perform a transaction on Ethereum, you face an unavoidable question: why do you need to pay fees for sending tokens, purchasing NFTs, or even just querying data? This fee is known as the Gas Fee.
Simply put, just like a car needs fuel to provide power, every operation on the blockchain consumes computational resources. The essence of the Gas Fee is to pay for these resources. On smart contract platforms like Ethereum, miners (or validators) need to perform complex calculations to verify transactions, and the Gas Fee is compensation for their work.
Interestingly, even if a transaction ultimately fails, users still need to pay the Gas Fee. This is because the network has already consumed computational resources to verify the transaction, regardless of the outcome. In contrast, Bitcoin only charges fees when a transaction is successful. The design of this mechanism serves a dual purpose: firstly, to...