Fees and the base fee floor

EIP-1559 with an AERE floor: what it changes and from which block.

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EIP-1559 with one AERE change: the base fee has a floor.

The rule

From block 10,141,734, the base fee on chain 2800 cannot fall below 1 Gwei (1,000,000,000 wei). Below the floor it is clamped to the floor. Above it, EIP-1559 behaves exactly as on Ethereum: the base fee rises when blocks are fuller than target and falls when they are emptier.

What it means for you

A plain transfer costs 21,000 gas, so its minimum cost is 21,000 x 1 Gwei = 0.000021 AERE.

Fee estimation from any standard library works unchanged. eth_feeHistory, eth_gasPrice and eth_maxPriorityFeePerGas all report the real values, floor included, so a wallet does not need to know about the floor to produce a valid transaction.

The thing that surprises tools is the shape of the curve: on a chain with little traffic the base fee does not decay toward zero, it decays to 1 Gwei and stays there.

Why the floor exists

Without it, a chain that produces a block every half second and is mostly empty settles at a base fee near zero, which prices transaction inclusion at approximately nothing and makes spam free. The floor is the cheapest defence that does not require a change to the fee market.

Fee burn, and a claim we do not make

AERE does not burn the base fee. The burn on this chain is a cut of the validator reward, routed by the AereSink contract at a Foundation-set rate that is hard-capped at 50%.

So base fee multiplied by gas used is not a burn figure on this chain, and any tool that presents it as one is wrong here. On an explorer page for a block you will see this stated rather than a number, because there is no honest per-block figure to print.

A caveat for node implementers

If you are following the chain rather than using it, the floor is a consensus rule: a client that does not enforce it computes a different base fee for the affected blocks, therefore a different state root, and rejects every block from block 10,141,734 onward.

The failure is quiet rather than loud. A client missing the floor does not crash; it reports a base fee below 1 Gwei and diverges. Check the value rather than waiting for an error.