Transaction fees

Historically, Starknet transaction fees could be paid with either ETH or STRK, as indicated by the transaction version used. However, since Starknet JSON-RPC spec version v0.8.0, the ability to send pre-v3 transactions (and thus pay fees with ETH) had been dropped. As a result, Starkli also no longer supports paying fees in ETH starting with release v0.4.0, where Starkli switched from spec v0.7.1 to v0.8.0.

ℹ️ Note

While JSON-RPC spec v0.8.0 dropped support for pre-v3 transactions, as of this writing they are still accepted by the Starknet network itself. If you need to send pre-v3 transactions, use a v0.3.x Starkli release.

This could be useful you are working with certain contracts that revert on v3 transactions. Do note that it's recommended that you upgrade these contracts to be v3-compatible, as pre-v3 transactions will eventually be disabled on the network itself.

Setting transaction fees manually

By default, Starkli requests a fee estimate from the provider, and a 50% buffer is added on top of the estimate to avoid failures due to price fluctuations. However, sometimes it might be desirable to manually specify the fees instead. Some common reasons to do this include:

  • The fee estimation returned by the provider is inaccurate;
  • You want to speed up command execution by skipping fee estimation; or
  • The transaction in question is flaky, so the estimation might fail.

Setting STRK fees manually

In transactions that pay fees in STRK, the fee is made up of 6 components:

  • l1_gas
  • l1_gas_price
  • l2_gas
  • l2_gas_price
  • l1_data_gas
  • l1_data_gas_price

These components indicate the maximum amount a user is willing to pay for a specific resource.

Each component has its own command line option for setting a manual value to be used:

  • l1_gas: --l1-gas
  • l1_gas_price: --l1-gas-price or --l1-gas-price-raw
  • l2_gas: --l2-gas
  • l2_gas_price: --l2-gas-price or --l2-gas-price-raw
  • l1_data_gas: --l1-data-gas
  • l1_data_gas_price: --l1-data-gas-price or --l1-data-gas-price-raw

To set any of the gas values, simply use its corresponding option. For example, to manually set a l1_gas value of 50000:

starkli invoke --strk eth transfer 0x1234 u256:100 --l1-gas 50000

💡 Tips

When all 3 gas options are manually set, Starkli does not perform a fee estimation and instead sources the gas_price values directly from the pending block header. Therefore, transaction failure will not be detected until it's reverted on-chain.

To set any of the gas_price values, use any of its two options. The --xx-gas-price variant accepts a decimal value in STRK (18 decimals). For example, to set the L1 gas price at 0.0001 STRK:

starkli invoke --strk eth transfer 0x1234 u256:100 --l1-gas-price 0.0001

Alternatively, the ‐‐xx-gas-price-raw variant can be used for raw price values in FRI (the smallest unit of STRK). This command is equivalent to the one shown above:

starkli invoke --strk eth transfer 0x1234 u256:100 --l1-gas-price-raw 100000000000000

💡 Tips

Even when all gas_price options are manually set, as long as any of the gas options is not set, Starkli will still perform a fee estimation to determine how much gas is needed.

Estimating the fee only (dry run)

Commands that send out transactions accept a --estimate-only flag, which stops command execution as soon as an estimate is generated.

An example command to estimate the fee for an ETH transfer:

starkli invoke eth transfer 0x1234 u256:100 --estimate-only