Transaction fees

Historically, Starknet transaction fees could only be paid with ETH. With the introduction of v3 transactions, however, users now have the option to pay fees in STRK if they so choose.

By default, Starkli sends transactions with ETH fees. The fee token can be set by using the --fee-token option (e.g., --fee-token STRK). Alternatively, you can also use the --eth or --strk shorthands.

ℹ️ Note

While it might seem to be the case, it's not true that v3 transactions provide the option to choose between fee tokens. Instead, v3 transactions are always paid with STRK. Starkli abstracts this away by automatically falling back to using older transaction versions when users choose to pay fees in ETH.

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.

Since transactions paying in ETH and STRK are priced differently, the options for manually setting fees are different depending on which token you're paying fees with.

Setting ETH fees manually

Transactions that pay fees in ETH are priced using a single max_fee value, which indicates the maximum amount of fees (in Wei) that an account is willing to pay.

Users can set the max_fee value by using the --max-fee option, which accepts a decimal value in Ether (18 decimals). For example, to perform an ETH transfer with a max_fee of 0.01 ETH:

starkli invoke eth transfer 0x1234 u256:100 --max-fee 0.01

If you already have the max_fee value in Wei, you can also use the raw value directly via the --max-fee-raw option. An equivalent command to the example above would be:

starkli invoke eth transfer 0x1234 u256:100 --max-fee-raw 10000000000000000

Setting STRK fees manually

Transactions that pay fees in STRK are priced differently from those that pay with ETH. Specifically, the fee is made up of two components: gas and gas_price, which indicate the maximum amount of L1 gas and the maximum L1 gas price a user is willing to pay, respectively.

To set the gas value, simply use the --gas option. For example, to manually set a gas value of 50000:

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

💡 Tips

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

To set the gas_price value, use the --gas-price option, which 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 --gas-price 0.0001

Similar to setting max_fee for ETH-priced transactions, the gas_price value can also be set with raw values by using --gas-price-raw. This command is equivalent to the one shown above:

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

💡 Tips

When gas_price is manually set but gas is not, Starkli will still perform a fee estimation to determine how much L1 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