Fee Market

A fee market forms when users or applications compete for limited blockspace or execution resources. Block producers and protocols can rank, reserve, or price capacity through fee rate, gas auctions, base fees, tips, packages, minimums, or other rules.

Pressure depends on incoming demand relative to usable capacity, not simply the number of pending transactions. Transaction size, dependencies, timing, minimum relay policy, block intervals, and producer preferences can all affect what confirms.

Higher fees can ration scarce capacity and contribute to validator or miner revenue, but volatile pricing can exclude low-value uses and make timing uncertain. More spare capacity can reduce bidding pressure while increasing the infrastructure permitted for worst-case blocks; it does not guarantee a particular fee.