2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS)
Gas Price Prediction Based on Machine Learning
Combined with Ethereum Mempool
1st Dongwan Lan
College of Computer Science and Technology
2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems (MASS) | 978-1-6654-7180-0/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/MASS56207.2022.00057
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Nanjing, China
lan.dw@nuaa.edu.cn
3rd Changchun Yin
College of Computer Science and Technology
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Nanjing, China
ycc0801@nuaa.edu.cn
4th Lu Zhou
College of Computer Science and Technology
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Nanjing, China
lu.zhou@nuaa.edu.cn
Abstract—Gas is the internal pricing (metering system) for
running a contract or in general any transaction in Ethereum.
With the popularity of Ethereum, the deficiency of current
Ethereum transaction pricing mechanism First Price Auctions
is being amplified. The fee paid to miners is the gas used
multiplied by the gas price. Hence, designing an effective and
accurate gas price prediction method is of great significance
for improving the efficiency, transparency and security of the
Ethereum transaction mechanism. After the Ethereum ”London”
Hard Fork update, EIP-1559 has been proposed to change
the historical gas mechanism and make transaction fees less
volatile and more predictable. Therefore, we propose a machine
learning based method to predict the gas price of next blocks
combined with a dynamic feature exploited from mempool after
the proposal of EIP-1559. Specifically, we consider the pending
transactions and their gas price in the mempool and take them
as a machine learning feature for the first time. Due to the
update brought by EIP-1559, we refine more features than the
related works. We use machine learning models combined with
the mempool features for prediction. Experiments conducted on
the dataset manifest that our model combined with the mempool
data shows good prediction performance, especially significantly
improving the two indicators MAE and RMSE. Furthermore,
we analyze and discuss the challenges of our scheme and the
potential profound effects brought by our work.
Index Terms—Ethereum, Gas Price, Machine Learning, Pre-
diction.
I. I NTRODUCTION
New transactions initiated in Ethereum need to be confirmed
by miners before being included in new blocks. Incentives
push those miners with computing power to validate these
transactions and include them into a block. The rewards for
2155-6814/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/MASS56207.2022.00057
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2nd Hao Wang
College of Computer Science and Technology
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Nanjing, China
wangh24@nuaa.edu.cn
5th Chunpeng Ge
College of Computer Science and Technology
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Nanjing, China
gecp@nuaa.edu.cn
6th Xiaozhen Lu
College of Computer Science and Technology
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Nanjing, China
luxiaozhen@nuaa.edu.cn
miners include the block revenue and the transaction fee.
Ethereum supports smart contracts, which greatly increases
the size and complexity of transactions. It requires Ethereum
to have a definite resource calculation mechanism to quan-
tify the resources consumed by transactions. Hence, the gas
mechanism is designed to satisfy this demand. Transactions on
the Ethereum network or various operations of smart contracts
need to consume different amounts of gas. The transaction fee
is determined by the gas consumption and the price of each
unit of gas calculated by Ethers, which is called the gas price.
According to the Ethereum transaction pricing mechanism
First Price Auctions, miners have the priority to include the
transactions with a higher gas price, which means users need
to raise their gas price to make their transactions confirmed
earlier. However, with the popularity of Ethereum and the
flourishment of DeFi and Dapps, the gas price has fluctuated
back and forth substantially and once reached 500 gwei on
May 1, 2022 [1]. In such an environment with unstable gas
price, it is difficult for users to choose an appropriate gas price
to strike a balance between their time and financial costs.
Ethereum core developers and several researchers have paid
much attention to this issue and attempted to propose some
solutions for improvement, including upgrading the gas fee
structure. On August 5th, 2021, Ethereum activated a major
backward-compatible update named “London” Hard Fork [2].
In this update, a proposal named EIP-1559 makes a significant
change on the historical gas fee mechanism in consideration of
efficient and economic motivations. The calculation method of
the gas fee is adjusted to to Gas · (BaseF ee + P riorityF ee),
346
 in which base fee is a relevantly stable value and can move
up or down each block according to a settled formula. It will
be burnt and not given to the miners. Users can specify the
maximum fee per gas they are willing to give to miners to
incentivize them to include their transactions. The purpose
of EIP-1559 is to improve the gas fee mechanism and make
transaction fees less volatile and more predictable.
However, EIP-1559 does not perform the desired effect.
According to Footprint Analytics [3], after the update, the
fees paid by users are mainly basic fees, and the priority fees
paid to miners are small and relatively stable. But the plateau
did not last long, and the price of Ethereum trading began to
fluctuate. Through observation, it can be seen that there are
still large fluctuations in the changes of gas price, and gas
price has even soared several times. Therefore, the prediction
for the gas price makes a lot of economic sense for users in
this undulatory transaction system.
A. Related Works
At present, several researches and online recommendation
tools for the gas price exist. Ethereum client Geth gives a
recommendation based on the gas price of previous blocks
[4]. Gasnow [5] makes gas price predictions based on the
mempool data in the mining pool, which is more accurate than
predictions based on historical data. Still, gasnow officially
stopped all services on October 16, 2021. EthGasStation uses
the Poisson regression model to make gas price predictions [6].
The above tools can provide real-time gas price predictions,
but there is still a gap between the predicted data and the actual
value. Liu et al. [7] proposed a Machine Learning Regression-
based gas price forecasting approach. Its models are based on
the transaction structure before the Ethereum London update.
Seven of all their models have unsatisfactory prediction results.
And we selected the model with a better prediction effect
for comparative experiments. Werner et al. [8] proposed a
deep learning-based price prediction model and an algorithm
parameterized by a user-specific urgency value to recommend
the gas price, with gas price predictions for different levels.
However, all of these works only consider the factors before
the update of EIP-1559 and may not be effective in the new
transaction system. Meanwhile, we find these works focus only
on one aspect and it lacks a comprehensive and multi-model
prediction method for the gas price prediction.
B. Motivation
Making the gas price become a visible and transparent index
can help users easily find the right gas price for their individual
demands. In the short term, predicting gas price accurately
can help recommend the gas price for several positions to
retrench the gas fee. In the long run, if this prediction can
be widely used, it will also have the potential to improve the
stability of gas price. So far, there is no prediction of gas price
for the adjusted gas mechanism and previous works lack the
comprehensive method. All of these considerations motivate
us to predict the Ethereum gas price that:
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1) captures features from the current gas mechanism after
the London Hard Fork update;
2) takes the mempool into consideration and combine it
with the machine learning algorithm.
C. Our Contribution
This paper predicts gas price by combining machine learn-
ing models with the current state of transactions in Ethereum’s
mempool. Features were selected through the analysis of the
transaction structure, combined with the changes in the gas fee
structure after the London update. While crawling the feature
data, we collect the data of gas price prediction based on the
Ethereum mempool in the same period. Merge the feature data
to generate a dataset from March 17, 2022, to April 13, 2022.
The experiment results show that the models combined with
mempool feature input can predict the median gas price of the
next block well. Furthermore, after conducting overall analysis
of the changing trend of its gas price, we find that the median
gas price after the update is mainly in the low price range.
Our contributions can be summarized as follows:
1) for the first time, we consider the real-time mempool
data and take them as the features with the LSTM (long-
short time memory) and XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient
Boosting) algorithms to propose a mempool-based ma-
chine learning gas price prediction model.
2) we consider the changes on gas mechanism after EIP-
1559 and conclude more significant features to make our
model more effective.
3) we collect real-world data from March 17, 2022 to April
13, 2022 and conduct the experiment on our model with
the data. We make comparisons with the related works
and demonstrate our model performs a greater prediction
performance, especially significantly improving the two
indicators MAE and RMSE.
4) we also analyze and discuss the challenges of our
scheme and the potential profound effects brought by
our work.
II. P RELIMINARY
To better understand the changing trend of Ethereum gas
price and the reasons for its change, this section will first
describe the basic transaction structure of Ethereum, the
process from transaction initiation to confirmation, and the
calculation method of gas fees. Later, we will introduce the
specific concepts and functions of the Ethereum mempool in
detail. Besides, we will present the rationale for the time series
model we utilize in our scheme.
A. Ethereum Gas Mechanism
In the transaction structure of Ethereum, gas price is the
price that users are willing to pay for gas, and gas limit is the
maximum amount of gas that each transaction can consume.
Ethereum calculates gas according to various operations in
the transaction. Not only do transactions have a gas limit,
but blocks also have a gas limit. Users set the gas price
according to their own needs. The user confirms the transaction
 after setting the parameters, and the transaction is sent to the
Ethereum network by the wallet node. Miners read transactions
in the Ethereum mempool and verify them. The gas fee is
what motivates miners to choose transactions. According to
the principle of incentive compatibility, rational miners will
prefer transactions with a high gas price to be processed.
The calculation method of the gas fee becomes the base fee
and the priority fee after London update. However, it can still
be understood as GasLimit·gasprice, and gas price becomes
composed of base fee and priority fee:
Gasf ee = GasLimit · GasP rice (1)
GasP rice = basef ee + priorityf ee (2)
priorityf ee = min(M P F P G, M F P G − basef ee) (3)
Among them, gas limit refers to the maximum gas that the
user is willing to pay. Max fee per gas refers to the maximum
gas price that a user is willing to pay to perform all operations
in the transaction, and we call it MF PG for short. Max
priority fee per gas refers to the highest gas price value of
the priority fee that the user is willing to pay to complete this
transaction, and we call it MPF PG for short.
The base fee will be automatically calculated according to
the block size. The base fee will automatically increase when
the block size is more than 15M [9]. When the block size is
less than 15M, the base fee will automatically decrease, and
the base fee will eventually be burned and destroyed to the
black address. The priority fee can be understood as a queuing
fee, which is part of the fee finally paid to miners. The actual
parameter that the user needs to set is the max priority fee per
gas and the max fee per gas. The user will return the excess
cost if the max fee per gas is more than the sum of the base
fee and priority fee.
B. Ethereum Mempool
Under normal circumstances, rational miners will work
to maximize their benefit. Miners will select transactions
with higher transaction fees in the Ethereum mempool for
verification and packaging. Before all the transaction content
is written into the block, the transaction content will be stored
in the mempool [10]. The mempool is the last step before the
transaction is confirmed by the block.
A mempool in Ethereum refers to a set of memory data
structures within an Ethereum node. Candidate transactions
are stored in the mempool before being mined by miners. It is
refered to “transaction pool” in Geth and “transaction queue”
in Parity. It can be understood as a waiting area before a block
accepts a transaction.
Valid transactions should go to the mempool before being
sent to an Ethereum node, but there is no unified mempool.
Instead, each node has its mempool, which it tries to keep
in sync with other peers over the Ethereum network. Since
network communication is not always reliable or timely, each
node has a slightly different mempool. Additionally, nodes
have different rules for which transactions they accept. Under
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normal circumstances, the transaction will leave the mempool
when the block receives it. Still, it is also possible for
transactions to be replaced due to the acceleration behavior
of others or discarded due to the mempool configuration of
the node. Therefore, transactions will increase the probability
of being confirmed by setting a higher gas price.
C. LSTM Neural Network
The LSTM model is specially designed to solve the long-
term dependency problem in general RNN [11]. RNN is a
neural network that contains recurrent cycles that allow the
persistence of information. The cycle is represented by a
continuous sequence. A recurrent neural network can be seen
as several identical basic units connected, and each basic unit
can pass information to the following basic unit.
To make up for the shortcomings of traditional RNN, the
LSTM model is specially designed. LSTM can be known as
a special RNN. Compared with conventional RNN, LSTM
inherently has good support for long-term dependencies. There
are two central cores of the LSTM model: the memory cell and
the non-linear gating unit. The memory cell is used to maintain
the system’s state, and the non-linear gate units are used to
regulate the information flowing into and out of memory tuples
at each point in time [12]. The LSTM neural network is shown
in fig.1, each cycle can be unrolled into an infinite number
of repeating basic units, and LSTM also unrolls the cycle
into repeating basic units. The internal structure of the basic
repeating unit in traditional RNN is straightforward, with only
one superficial neural network layer. Still, the basic repeating
unit of LSTM uses four neural network layers and interacts
with each other in a special relationship.
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Fig. 1. LSTM Neuron Network.
This cell operates on the input of the current time t, the
input of the previous time t-1, and the three vectors of the
state to obtain the output and state of the present time.
D. XGBoost Regression Prediction
XGBoost efficiently implements the gradient boosting ma-
chine learning algorithm, a particular gradient boosting de-
cision tree that performs well on multiple machine learning
problems. The main idea is to make shared decisions by
concatenating multiple decision tree models [13]. The con-
catenated method we call iterative error prediction. After each
 decision tree is trained, there will be an error. The next
decision tree will be trained on this error, and there will be
errors in the prediction results, and so on. Trees are used
to predict the error of the previous tree, and the sum of the
prediction results of all trees is the final prediction result.
The XGBoost model can be simply expressed as:
T form of (block num, gasprice), then combine and group all

ft (x) = ht (x) (4)
t=1
Among them, ft (x) represents the sum of the previous t
trees, and ht (x) represents the result of the tth decision tree.
It can also be expressed recursively:
ft (x) = ft−1 (x) + ht (x) (5)
III. A M ULTI -M ODEL P REDICTION M ETHOD FOR
DYNAMIC A DJUSTMENT OF M EMPOOLS
In this section, we will introduce our model and explain
from the various parts of the model. Fig.2 shows the over-
all structure of the entire prediction model. First, we make
prediction based on mempool through two different methods.
Then, the prediction data are merged with other transaction
data crawled through etherscan API to be the original dataset.
We extract feature data after preprocessing the original dataset
and put them into machine learning models. Finally, the
LSTM model performs point-by-point prediction and sequence
prediction respectively, and the XGBoost model performs
classification prediction.
A. Gas Price Prediction Method Based on mempool
The regression prediction method based on machine learn-
ing considers the correlation of past data relative to the pre-
diction target. According to the transaction structure and Gas
mechanism, we selected some features with a high correlation
with gas price as possible. However, gas price can also be
affected by quite a few external factors. If users are eager
to get their transactions confirmed without caring about other
cost factors, then gas price is affected due to human subjective
factors. If the current Ethereum price is too high, users may
lower their bids, and then gas price will be affected by
objective factors. We can also think that gas price is a relatively
independent individual from this perspective. Then the pending
transactions in the mempool in real time become our essential
reference factor.
We design two schemes to make a prediction based on
mempool. The first is to predict based on the overall state
of the current mempool, and the second is to predict based on
the condition of the last 100 blocks. We connect to the remote
node through infura and obtain the transaction currently in
the cache according to the keyword gas price for the first
method. Check its validity period in the mempool, which is
how long it can survive in the mempool. Next, we get the
block that is currently pending. If there is no transaction in it,
an empty block, it will return a null value and a block number.
If there are transactions in the pending block, they are sorted in
descending order by gas price. Record the current timestamp,
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and return the second-to-last value in the sorted transaction as
the predicted value of the next block.
The second method is to process all transactions of the last
100 blocks from now and predict the next block according to
the overall situation of the transactions. The specific steps are
as follows: first, extract all transactions of 200 blocks in the
transactions’ data according to the same gas price and count
the number, and convert it to (count, GasP rice) form. Then
sort all gas price in ascending order, calculate the cumulative
sum of the corresponding counts, and the cumulative sum
of the lowest gas price is the total number of transactions.
Finally, divide the accumulated sum by the total number of all
transactions, and we record it as pct. Based on the stability of
the speed of on-chain, we can set the gas price for fast chaining
when pct>80%. Its complete workflow chart is shown in
Fig. 3.
As shown in Fig.4, we compare the predicted results with
the actual gas price. There is a specific error in the mempool
prediction gas price results based on the above two methods.
However, it can be seen that the changing trend is very
consistent with the actual value. Therefore, if the data obtained
by the two prediction methods are input into the machine
learning model as features, the correlation between the features
and the prediction target should be extremely high. Meanwhile,
considering the impact of other transaction factors on gas
price, we decided to collect the data predicted by the two
methods based on mempool and combine them with other
feature data according to the intersection item. We record the
feature data of the first method as mem1 gp and the second
method as mem2 gp.
B. Feature Extraction
According to the Ethereum transaction structure and gas
fee structure described in Chapter 2, we select the following
features: GasLimit, Gasused, base fee per gas (BF PG), avg
max fee per gas (AMF PG), avg max priority fee per gas
( AMPF PG), difficulty, transactions(txs) as factors affecting
the fluctuation of gas price. Each feature is described in detail
below:
• GasLimit: The gas limit defined in the user transaction
refers to the maximum gas that the user is willing to pay
in order to execute this transaction [14]. The gas limit
in the block is defined as the maximum amount of gas
allowed in the entire block, that is, the maximum limit
of the gas sum of all transactions.
• GasUsed: All commands in the EVM are set with the gas
to be spent, and the gas used is the total amount of gas
consumed by all commands executed in this transaction.
Both gas limit and gas used are concepts of quantity.
• Base fee per gas: It refers to the minimum effective
gas price the user needs to pay in the transaction. This
parameter is newly proposed in the EIP-1559 proposal
after the London update. The calculation method of the
base fee is GasU sed · BF P G
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Fig. 3. Block Transaction Analysis and Prediction Workflow.

Fig. 4. Prediction Based on Mempool.

• Max fee per gas: It refers to the maximum gas price that
the user is willing to pay to perform all operations in
the transaction. This parameter needs to be set in each
transaction. So, we take this parameter’s average value
for all transactions in a block as the feature, which is
recorded as avg max fee per gas, refer to it as AMF PG.
• Max priority fee per gas: It refers to the highest gas
price of the priority fee that the user is willing to pay
[15]. It can be understood that when max fee per gas and
max priority fee per gas are set to the same value, then
max fee per gas is equivalent to the gas price before the
update. Similarly, this parameter needs to be set for each
transaction in Ethereum, so we also select the average
value of this parameter in all transactions in one block
as the feature input value, which is recorded as avg max
priority fee per gas, referred to as AMPF PG.
• Difficulty: It refers to the mining difficulty of the current
block of Ethereum. The mining difficulty will be dynam-
ically adjusted according to the current mining situation
of Ethereum, so that the block time can be controlled
within a stable interval as much as possible. The mining
difficulty can also indirectly reflect the competition status
of the current transaction [16].
• Transactions count: refers to the number of transactions
contained in the current block, referred to as txs.
C. Gas Price Prediction Method Based on Machine Learning
Analysis of the transaction structure of Ethereum and the
gas mechanism will lead to such characteristics. First, the base
fee will be adjusted according to the usage of the previous
block, and the size of the target block will be compared with
the size of the last block. If the size of the last block exceeds
the current target block, the base fee will increase by up to
12.5%. Secondly, changes in the base fee will also indirectly
affect the settings of the priority fee. Ultimately, it will affect
the user’s settings for gas price. Then we can reasonably
believe that the block state before the target block impacts
the gas price of the current target block. Therefore, we select
a deep LSTM neural network for time series forecasting.
First, we convert and load the merged dataset from a CSV
file into a pandas dataframe, which is used to feed the numpy
array of the LSTM. The Keras LSTM layer works by using
a three-dimensional (N, W, F) numpy array [17], where N
is the number of neurons in the training sequence, W is the
sequence length, and F is the number of features per sequence.
We choose N as 70, W as 50, and F as 3, 4, and 5. After
loading the data and building the model, we train and test
the model on the dataset. For the output, the model can make
predictions in two modes: the first makes predictions on a

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 point-by-point basis, predicting only one point at a time, and
the following window uses the complete test data to predict
the next point. The second method is to predict a complete
sequence, using only a portion of the training data set for
initializing the training window and moving the window as the
model predicts the next point as in the point-by-point mode. In
the second-step prediction, only one piece of data comes from
the previous prediction. There are two data from the previous
prediction in the third-step prediction, and so on 50 times. The
data will all be the previous prediction data [17]. Its simplified
schematic diagram is shown in Fig.5.
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After obtaining the original data, firstly, we convert the base
to decimal data, then process the null values in the data, and
finally, unify the unit in Gwei. Among them, the max fee per
gas and max priority fee of all transactions are taken as the
feature input with the block number as the standard, and the
average and median gas price are taken simultaneously. The
median gas price is used as the prediction target. For empty
block data, miners occasionally mine only an empty block
without packaging any transactions. The gas price of this data
is 0. The frequency of such data is not high, which is a normal
phenomenon.
At the same time as the etherscan data crawling, the gas
price data obtained by the two prediction methods through the
etherscan as the original data source. The two types of data
predicted based on the Ethereum mempool are mem1 gp and
mem2 gp. We merge the data of mem1 gp with the original

« data source according to timestamp and merge the data of

mem2 gp with the original data source according to the block
« number. The finally combined data format is shown in Table
’—– —–’—– I.
The lack of max fee per gas and max priority fee per gas in
Fig. 5. Simplified LSTM Prediction. the transaction data is because the transaction does not adopt
the Gas mechanism after the London update. The gas price is
We compare the functions, advantages and disadvantages
not divided into two parts, and the base fee is the gas price.
of multiple time series model forecasting. Based on the
The standard process of averaging needs to be divided by
processing ability of abnormal data and missing data, it can
the total number of transactions in the block, so it is only
be found that XGBoost has good performance and portability.
necessary to remove the number of transactions that do not
According to the collected data, Ethereum blocks occasionally
use the improved gas mechanism from the total number of
have incredibly high data, or miners choose not to package any
transactions and then average.
transactions and only empty blocks, resulting in missing gas
price values. Considering the above factors, we additionally B. Evaluation Indicators
choose the XGBoost regression prediction model, which can
have good compatibility with abnormal data. We use three of the most popular predictors, MAE, RMSE,
and R2score, which are defined as follows:
IV. E XPERIMENTS • MAE: Mean Absolute Error.
In this section, we will evaluate the performance of the m
1 
model. After flattening the data obtained by the two prediction M AE = |(yi − yˆi )| (6)
methods based on mempool and aligning the feature data m i=1
crawled by etherscan [18], they are input into the XGBoost
MAE is the mean value of absolute error, which can well
and LSTM models respectively. XGBoost sets the null value
reflect the actual situation of predicted value error.
processing method to use the average value of the feature
• MSE: Mean Squared Error, the summed average of
column to fill and sets the ratio of the training set to test set
the squared difference between the true value and the
to 7.5:2.5. We use the XGBoost regression model for training
predicted value.
and making the prediction. We use the mean absolute error,
m
mean square error, and R2 score as evaluation criteria to judge 1  2
the experiment results. (yi − yˆi ) (7)
m i=1
A. Datasets and Preprocessing
• RMSE: Root Mean Square Error.
We collect Ethereum transaction data from March 17, 2022, 
 m
to April 13, 2022 and perform data crawling through the API 1 
RM SE = 
2
provided by etherscan according to the established character- (yi − yˆi ) (8)
m i=1
istics [18]. Then we process the raw data to become a usable
dataset. At this stage, our primary work is to unify data units,
• R2 score
fill in missing valuable information and relabel some features. n 2
A total of 159,792 pieces of raw data were collected, (yi − ŷi )
R2 = 1 − ni=1 2 ∈ [0, 1] (9)
recorded as one piece of data with one block as the standard.
i=1 (yi − y i )

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 TABLE I
E XAMPLE OF P REPROCESSED DATA

BlockNum gas limit gas used BF PG D timestamp tx AMF PG AMPF PG MEM1 MEM2 MGP
14414732 30087858 30046709 42.7700 129 1647664473 591 64.8997 2.5284 38 44 44.1700
14414733 30058477 15337995 48.1016 129 1647664497 238 59.0064 4.3336 38 49 49.5016
14414734 30087829 20536989 48.2251 129 1647664514 428 64.7157 3.7728 38 49 49.6251
14414735 30117210 30110033 50.4262 129 1647664531 374 110.2117 11.3203 42 51 52.4262
...

In the above formula, ŷ is the predicted output value of the requires real-time connection of nodes to collect the current
model, and y represents the average value of the actual value. Ethereum mempool data. Therefore, comparative experiments
The above measures will have different meanings depending can only be compared within the range of features that can be
on the model. The specific number loses readability. The value collected. Table III shows the comparison data of the indicators
of R2 is between 0 and 1, and its value reflects the relative of the two models. From the MAE perspective, our model has
degree of the regression contribution, that is, the percentage improved considerably. From an RMSE perspective, there is
that the regression relationship can explain in the change of less room for improvement without including the mempool
the dependent variable. input.
The advantage of R2 is that the results are normalized,
making it easier to see the gaps between the models. Typically, TABLE III
for training dataset, the range of values is [0,1]. For the testing E RROR DATA C OMPARISON
set, the value may also be negative [19]. Generally speaking, Training Set Testing Set
Model
the higher the value, the higher the degree of explanation of MAE RMSE MAE RMSE
the independent variable to the dependent variable, and the LSTM 0.09 0.32 0.08 0.12
XGB 0.91 1.51 0.54 3.01
higher the percentage of the change caused by the independent MLR-LSTM 3.21 1.60 3.04 1.76
variable to the total change. MLR-XGB 2.66 1.51 2.75 1.54

C. Results and Analysis

We get the Ethereum mempool information by connect- Analyzing the reasons, we consider that Liu’s work is all
ing to the infura remote node. And all the experiments forecasting work before the London update. Our model is
were conducted on a laptop with 11th Gen Intel Core i5- designed in combination with London update transaction struc-
1135G7@2.40GHz, 16 GB memory, and 512 GB SSD. Fig.6 ture, and the factors considered may be more comprehensive
shows the variation of gas price between predicted and true and more suitable for the prediction of gas price.
values for each model. Predicted sample points from 300 to Since our model needs to access the data in the mempool in
400 were selected for plotting for LSTM and MEM-LSTM real-time, we decided to use the model of Liu et al. and collect
models. Predicted sampling points from 0 to 100 were selected the relevant data between April 18, 2022, and May 13, 2022,
for the XGB and MEM-XGB models for plotting, and it for training and testing. Contrast experiments with our model.
can be seen that each model fits well. Table II shows the We selected two models with relatively good performance
values of MAE, RMSE and R2 for all current models on results for comparison according to the original text. The
the training set and test set. Based on the overall results, the experimental results are as Table IV.
model combined with the mempool features is better. From
the perspective of MAE and RMSE, LSTM has a better effect TABLE IV
E RROR DATA C OMPARISON BASED ON M EMPOOL
on prediction. From an R2 perspective, the XGBoost model
has better predictive capabilities. The input of the mempool Model
Training Set Testing Set
feature has a greater impact on the XGBoost model. MAE RMSE MAE RMSE
MLR-LSTM(Liu’s) 3.68 1.97 4.02 2.07
MLR-XGB(Liu’s) 2.72 1.78 2.83 1.84
TABLE II MEM-LSTM(Ours) 0.09 0.33 0.06 0.11
E RROR R ESULTS OF P REDICTION MEM-XGB(Ours) 0.27 0.41 0.39 0.95
Training Set Testing Set
Model
MAE RMSE R2 MAE RMSE R2
LSTM 0.089 0.324 0.160 0.082 0.119 0.821 It can be seen that the machine learning regression pre-
XGB 0.910 1.507 0.998 0.535 3.007 0.955 diction model combined with the mempool features has a
MEM-LSTM 0.087 0.334 0.108 0.064 0.108 0.843
MEM-XGB 0.271 0.409 0.998 0.390 0.950 0.962
more notable improvement over the original machine learning
model.

According to the prediction work of Liu et al. [2] for gas V. D ISCUSSION
price in 2019, we used the data of the same period for com- In this section, we focus on some of the challenges encoun-
parative experiments. The prediction method for the mempool tered by our scheme and their potential causes. In addition,

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 Fig. 6. Overall Prediction of Gas Price.
we also point out other potential additional impacts that our
method may bring.
A. Anomaly Detection
We find that our model was not fit well at predicting when
faced with a data surge. We have tried some solutions, such
as adding a feature to evaluate the possible impact of certain
unexpected events on gas price or detecting behaviors such
as malicious price hikes that increase gas prices for a certain
period. However, the experiment results still cannot accurately
predict the mutation data. The frequency of such abnormal
data is about 0.1%-0.2%. Although not frequently, it is still a
challenge that our model needs to consider and address.
We tracked and analyzed all transactions in several blocks
before and after these mutation data and some events that
occurred around this moment that may affect the gas price.
Moreover, we tried to discover the reasons and laws behind it.
We first selected 41 abnormal data from more than 40,000
pieces of data. We considered the related transaction data
of 5 blocks before and after them and the external events
that occurred at the corresponding time. After analyzing, we
summarize three potential causes of gas price mutation:
1) These abnormal transactions may come from the smart
contracts of some token systems, such as NFT or other
decentralized financial projects. They often choose to
significantly increase the gas price for specific incentives
so that their transactions can be listed on the chain as
soon as possible to ensure that their financial needs are
confirmed.
2) Some anomaly data is due to the bidding wave of some
arbitrage bots. The prominent feature of this situation
is that transactions from two or more same addresses
and nonces appear multiple in the pending mempool at
a specific moment with gradually increasing gas prices.
In order to succeed in the zero-sum game, these arbitrage
robots will increase the gas price wildly, sometimes
hundreds of times, in order to beat their opponents,
which is described in detail in [20].
3) A tiny portion of the mutation data has no apparent
pattern. We speculate that this may be due to personal
reasons, such as curious attempts or misoperations when
using Ethereum for the first time.
The first two types of data account for 36 of the 41
abnormal data, which can be classified as uncontrolled bidding
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behaviors, resulting in a surge in gas prices. The starting points
of these behaviors are different, but they all have a common
feature: the sender of the transaction does not care about the
cost increase caused by the increase in gas price. They believe
that transaction confirmation speed is more important than
the economic cost of high consumption. These are complex
challenges for our predictions because we cannot intervene
or predict the subjective consciousness of others. In essence,
these abnormal data appear due to the contingency brought
about by the Ethereum transaction bidding mechanism. How-
ever, we can also analyze these behaviors from other angles.
We can mark these active addresses and increase the weight
of this feature when the mark appears to offset the impact of
subjective factors on gas price, which can be the future work.
B. Impacts on Transaction Fee Mechanism
Ethereum historically priced transaction fees using a simple
auction mechanism, where users send transactions with bids
(”gas prices”) and miners choose transactions with the highest
bids, and transactions that get included pay the bid that they
specify [15]. Although it can effectively satisfy the demands
for many transactions to be uploaded quickly, a system, that
leaves the uploading order of transactions entirely in the
hands of the miners, gives them too much power, which may
lead to several unfair behaviors such as frontrunning [20] or
freeloading [21]. Meanwhile, since transaction fees are an vital
source of income for miners, rational miners naturally hope the
gas price can be as high as possible because transaction fees =
gas price * gas used. What we want is a consensus mechanism
that is completely transparent and perfectly symmetric in
information for all.
On the face of it, our work is only a prediction of the
gas price and it has little impact on the gas price. However,
gas price is an unknown information for users while miners
have more information about transactions and gas price than
users with access to mempool. Therefore, there is a potential
possibility of attack. However, the real-time prediction of gas
price brought by our work brings a possible indicator of
gas price for many users like a lighthouse, amplifying the
transparency of this unknown property and thus potentially
limiting some unfair behavior. Furthermore, based on our
predictions, users can ideally better choose the timing of their
sent transactions and more precisely choose the threshold of
gas price needed to achieve their goals. This further reduces
 the magnitude of gas price fluctuations, thus indirectly helping
to achieve better stability of gas price.
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose a multi-model gas price prediction
method combined with Ethereum mempool feature input.
While collecting Ethereum block transaction data, read the
transaction gas price in the mempool. This data is used to
predict the gas price of the next block through two non-
machine learning methods. The two kinds of prediction data
are collected and processed, and fused with the selected feature
data. Finally, the fused feature data is input into the two mod-
els. Experiments show that it has excellent performance for
the model combined with mempool feature input. Compared
with the model without mempool feature input, the prediction
ability has been improved to a certain extent. Compared
with the existing gas price prediction work, it has a good
improvement in prediction ability.
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VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by the National Key
R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2020YFB1005900,
2020B0101090002), the National Key R&D Program of
Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2020B0101090002), the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.
62032025, 62071222, U21A201710, U20A201092), and the
Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No.
BK20200418, BK20220880).

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