Compare Crypto Network Fees Across Chains

Lightning Network, Solana, and the major Ethereum L2s (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism) all routinely cost under a few cents per send in 2026. After the Pectra upgrade (May 2025) cut L2 blob costs by roughly half, L2 simple transfers commonly land at 1–3 cents. Solana base fees are a fraction of a cent before any priority tip. There is no single 'lowest' — the best rail depends on the asset, the recipient, and current load.

Each chain charges for its own block space in its own unit — Ethereum gas, Solana lamports, Bitcoin sat/vB. USDC on Ethereum mainnet pays Ethereum gas; USDC on Solana pays Solana fees; USDC on Base pays L2 gas amortized over a blob. The asset is the same token at the contract level on each chain, but the network charging the fee — and the demand on that network — is different.

The Pectra upgrade (May 7, 2025) doubled blob throughput via EIP-7691, raising the target from 3 to 6 blobs per block and the max from 6 to 9. According to data following the upgrade, daily rollup blob spend fell by roughly 51%, which translated to L2 user fees commonly running in the 1–10 cent range for typical sends. Numbers move with demand — verify live on l2fees.info.

Yes. Sending an asset to an address on a network the recipient doesn't accept can lose the funds. Centralized exchanges sometimes recover wrong-network sends for a fee, but self-custody wallets typically cannot. Confirm the network on the recipient side before hitting send — the address format alone is not enough.

Under congestion Solana validators use Stake-Weighted Quality of Service (swQoS), which reserves around 80% of leader bandwidth for staked connections and ~20% for unstaked traffic. If unstaked bandwidth saturates, transactions get dropped before fees are evaluated — meaning priority fee math becomes irrelevant. Sophisticated senders use staked RPC providers; everyday senders rarely hit this, since most Solana transactions still confirm for fractions of a cent.

"Congested" and "down" mean different things. Congestion — fees spiking because more transactions are competing for the same block space — happens often and is normal; check a live tracker like mempool.space for Bitcoin or etherscan.io/gastracker for Ethereum before sending if timing matters. An actual network outage, where the chain stops producing blocks entirely, is extremely rare — Bitcoin and Ethereum have run with well above 99.9% uptime since their mainnets launched. What people usually mean by "is the network down" is really "fees are high right now," which a live fee tracker answers directly rather than a fixed page ever could.

USDT (and several other stablecoins) exist as the same token deployed on multiple blockchains — commonly Ethereum (as an ERC-20 token), Tron (as a TRC-20 token), and others like Solana or BNB Chain. When an exchange or wallet asks you to pick a "network" for a USDT deposit or withdrawal, it's asking which of these blockchain deployments you're using — not a fee tier or speed setting. TRC-20 USDT transfers on Tron typically cost a fraction of a cent; ERC-20 USDT transfers on Ethereum mainnet can cost several dollars in gas. Sending to the wrong network — for example, sending TRC-20 USDT to an address that only accepts ERC-20 — is one of the most common ways crypto gets permanently lost, so always match the network on both ends before you send.

Exchange and wallet fees stack ON TOP of the blockchain's own network fee — they never replace it. Coinbase, Robinhood, Revolut, Trust Wallet, and PayPal are all examples of platforms whose own withdrawal fee, spread, or service charge sits alongside the network fee the blockchain still charges to actually confirm your transaction; the platform doesn't get to skip paying the chain just because it's also charging you. Some platforms itemize the two charges separately at checkout, others bundle them into one number, but the underlying chain fee is never optional. See our Coinbase fees and Revolut crypto fees guides for how each platform's own layer works.

XRP Ledger fees aren't set by an auction the way Bitcoin's sat/vB or Ethereum's gas market are — most transactions pay a fixed reference cost of just 0.00001 XRP (10 drops), which is destroyed rather than paid to any validator. The XRP Ledger's consensus protocol can raise this minimum algorithmically if the network comes under unusual spam load, but in normal operation the cost stays pinned at the 10-drop floor no matter how many transactions are competing for the same ledger close. That's structurally different from Bitcoin and Ethereum, where every transaction bids against every other transaction for limited block space.

Polygon runs far cheaper because its gas token, POL, trades for a fraction of ETH's price, not because Polygon charges fewer gwei. A simple transfer on Polygon costs $0.0001 to $0.001, while the same transfer on Ethereum mainnet can run from a few cents up to several dollars depending on how full recent blocks are. Ethereum's own Layer 2s, including Base and Arbitrum, close most of that gap by posting compressed data back to Ethereum rather than running a separate validator set the way Polygon does. See /fees/polygon-gas-fees for the full breakdown.

Bitcoin and Ethereum price fees on entirely different bases, so a direct number comparison misleads more than it helps. Bitcoin charges for raw transaction data size in sat/vB regardless of what the transaction does, while Ethereum charges for computation in gas units. A Bitcoin send and a plain Ethereum transfer can land close in cost, but a Bitcoin send and an Ethereum smart-contract call rarely do, since Bitcoin has no smart-contract execution to price. Bitcoin also has no Layer-2 gas market of its own outside Lightning, which routes payments off-chain at well under a cent. See /fees/bitcoin-transaction-fees and /fees/lightning-network-fees for how each side works.

Solana charges a flat 5,000-lamport base fee per signature, a fraction of a cent regardless of network conditions, while Ethereum mainnet's gas fee floats with demand and can run from cents to several dollars for the same operation. The two chains price congestion differently too: Solana's local fee markets raise the cost of writing to one specific busy account without touching the base fee everywhere else, while Ethereum's base fee rises network-wide the moment any block fills up. An Ethereum Layer 2 narrows the dollar gap with Solana considerably, but Solana's flat per-signature model still tends to land lower for a simple transfer. See /fees/solana-transaction-fees for Solana's own fee mechanics.

Solana confirms and finalizes a transaction in under a second, which makes it the fastest of the chains compared on this page for an everyday send. Lightning settles a routed Bitcoin payment instantly too, but only across the channels it can route through. Ethereum's Layer 2s confirm on their own rollup in a few seconds, though a full withdrawal back to Ethereum mainnet without a fast-exit provider still waits out the rollup's challenge window. None of this changes which rail is cheapest. Speed and fee size are two separate numbers, and the fastest chain for a given send is not always the cheapest one.