How to Send Transactions with EIP 1559

5 min readAug 13, 2021

The London Hardfork introduced a new EIP that modifies how gas estimation and costs work for transactions on Ethereum.

This tutorial will walk you through both the legacy and new (EIP-1559) way to estimate gas and send transactions. To learn more about EIP-1559, check out this blog post.

How sending transactions used to work

When you submitted a transaction you also sent a gasPrice, which is an amount you are offering to pay per gas consumed. You probably called eth_estimateGas and eth_gasPrice in order to determine an approximate amount that the transaction was going to cost you. Then, when you submitted the transaction, miners could decide to include it or not based on your gasPrice bid. Miners would prioritize the highest gas prices.How sending transactions work with EIP 1559

How sending transactions work with EIP 1559

It’s a similar concept, but with a few incentive changes in order to more closely align user and miner interests. The total fee (gas * gasPrice) will be split into a baseFee and a priorityFee. Every transaction needs to pay the base fee, which is calculated based on how full the previous block was. Transactions can also offer the miner a priorityFee to incentivize the miner to include the transaction in the block.

I won’t go into the incentive model here, if you want to dive into that check out this blog post.

Let’s send a transaction

First, let’s send a legacy (non EIP 1559 transaction). The steps below are:

Estimate the gas of our call
Get an estimate on what the price per gas should be
Send the transaction.

This example uses Alchemy’s web3 wrapper.

require("dotenv").config();
const AlchemyWeb3 = require("@alch/alchemy-web3");const { API_URL_HTTP_PROD_RINKEBY, PRIVATE_KEY, ADDRESS } = process.env;
const toAddress = "0x31B98D14007bDEe637298086988A0bBd31184523";
const web3 = AlchemyWeb3.createAlchemyWeb3(API_URL_HTTP_PROD_RINKEBY);async function signTx(web3, fields = {}) {
  const nonce = await web3.eth.getTransactionCount(ADDRESS, 'latest');const transaction = {
   'nonce': nonce,
   ...fields,
  };
 
  return await web3.eth.accounts.signTransaction(transaction, PRIVATE_KEY);
}async function sendTx(web3, fields = {}) {
  const signedTx = await signTx(web3, fields);web3.eth.sendSignedTransaction(signedTx.rawTransaction, function(error, hash) {
    if (!error) {
      console.log("Transaction sent!", hash);
      const interval = setInterval(function() {
        console.log("Attempting to get transaction receipt...");
        web3.eth.getTransactionReceipt(hash, function(err, rec) {
          if (rec) {
            console.log(rec);
            clearInterval(interval);
          }
        });
      }, 1000);
    } else {
      console.log("Something went wrong while submitting your transaction:", error);
    }
  });
}function sendLegacyTx(web3) {
  web3.eth.estimateGas({
    to: toAddress,
    data: "0xc6888fa10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003"
  }).then((estimatedGas) => {
    web3.eth.getGasPrice().then((price) => {
      sendTx(web3, {
        gas: estimatedGas,
        gasPrice: price,
        to: toAddress,
        value: 100,
      });
    });
  });
}sendLegacyTx(web3);

Your existing code probably looks somewhat different, but the idea is the same. Here is the output:

Transaction sent! 0x8612c1c1a20e2f2512df43f62d3b1f91bfc86c577a72dc1b7d3ad0cc49bb97a8
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
{
  transactionHash: '0x8612c1c1a20e2f2512df43f62d3b1f91bfc86c577a72dc1b7d3ad0cc49bb97a8',
  blockHash: '0x930486f72436f6e8203474794f2dbbdee42c57846e848f54e75fd0a02103cea6',
  blockNumber: 9058813,
  contractAddress: null,
  cumulativeGasUsed: 1849069,
  effectiveGasPrice: '0x3b9aca08',
  from: '0x52b9234231d1459aaa6a9f79e7b7af7464c4f587',
  gasUsed: 21000,
  logs: [],
  logsBloom: '0x00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000',
  status: true,
  to: '0x31b98d14007bdee637298086988a0bbd31184523',
  transactionIndex: 14,
  type: '0x0'
}

Using EIP-1559 with Minimal changes

The smallest possible change we can make to the original code is to simply remove the gasPrice field on the transaction. So our calling code will look like this:

function sendMinimalLondonTx(web3) {
  web3.eth.estimateGas({
    to: toAddress,
    data: "0xc6888fa10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003"
  }).then((estimatedGas) => {
    sendTx(web3, {
      gas: estimatedGas,
      to: toAddress,
      value: 100,
    });
  });
}sendMinimalLondonTx(web3);

In this case Alchemy will fill in reasonable defaults for the new London transaction fields. Notice how we have removed the getGasPrice call. The output looks pretty similar:

Transaction sent! 0xb49dbe2ae38664f3881c33ad067d30fb27717709d800b0b87fd9d4a57479a775
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
Attempting to get transaction receipt...
{
  blockHash: '0x87ff71d0431cc4e271b44f72a0aa235822c35ee20e8eb8ebaf64916141ce7a91',
  blockNumber: 9058915,
  contractAddress: null,
  cumulativeGasUsed: 583419,
  effectiveGasPrice: '0x3b9aca08',
  from: '0x52b9234231d1459aaa6a9f79e7b7af7464c4f587',
  gasUsed: 21000,
  logs: [],
  logsBloom: '0x00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000',
  status: true,
  to: '0x31b98d14007bdee637298086988a0bbd31184523',
  transactionHash: '0xb49dbe2ae38664f3881c33ad067d30fb27717709d800b0b87fd9d4a57479a775',
  transactionIndex: 9,
  type: '0x0'
}

Add maxPriorityFeePerGas field only

The closest analogy to the gas:gasPrice combination is gas:maxPriorityFeePerGas. Since the baseFee needs to be paid regardless, we can just submit a bid on the "tip" for the miner. Our calling code becomes:

function sendOnlyMaxPriorityFeePerGasLondonTx(web3) {
  web3.eth.estimateGas({
    to: toAddress,
    data: "0xc6888fa10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003"
  }).then((estimatedGas) => {
    web3.eth.getMaxPriorityFeePerGas().then((price) => {
      sendTx(web3, {
        gas: estimatedGas,
        maxPriorityFeePerGas: price,
        to: toAddress,
        value: 100,
      });
    });
  });
}sendOnlyMaxPriorityFeePerGasLondonTx(web3);

Note that we have substituted the web3.eth.getGasPrice() call in the legacy code with web3.eth.getMaxPriorityFeePerGas(). I won't bore you with the output, it looks the same. The eth_maxPriorityFeePerGas method is documented here.

Add maxFeePerGas field only (a la Eth Gas Station)

If you are accustomed to using a fee estimator like Eth Gas Station then instead of providing only the tip you will provide only the maxFeePerGas field, which is the base fee plus tip. You can take the output of your API call to Eth Gas Station or another estimator and plug it in like so:

web3.eth.estimateGas({
  to: toAddress,
  data: "0xc6888fa10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003"
}).then((estimatedGas) => {
  ethGasStationCall().then((price) => {
    sendTx(web3, {
      gas: estimatedGas,
      maxPriorityFee: price,
      to: toAddress,
      value: 100,
    });
  });
});

Viewing the baseFee

When you send an EIP 1559 transaction you will always be charged the baseFee. You can view the baseFee for the current block with:

web3.eth.getBlock("pending").then((block) => console.log(block.baseFeePerGas));

Which returns a hex:

0x8

Building a more sophisticated gas estimate

Alchemy has exposed the eth_maxPriorityFeePerGas method so that you can pretty much call that and not worry too much about fee calculations. However you might want to make your own calculations, similar to how you might currently offer a "low", "medium", and "high" fee (like what Eth Gas Station offers). To do this, you can use the eth_feeHistory API, which returns detailed information on historical fees for blocks, allowing you to build a better estimate. You can check out our post on how to do that here.

After sending a transaction, you might want to update the gas price later. For instance if it stays pending for too long. For details on that you can read our post here.

If you’re interested in learning more, or have feedback, suggestions, or questions, reach out to us in Discord! Get started with Alchemy today by signing up for free.