Transactions that paid 0 fees

Question

I took a sample of transactions from 2021-07-03 till 2021-07-05 and there seems to be a lot of transactions that paid 0 ETH in fees:

  `as.Date(dt)` count `min(dt)`           `max(dt)`          
  <date>        <int> <dttm>              <dttm>             
1 2021-07-03     1081 2021-07-03 21:41:42 2021-07-03 23:59:38
2 2021-07-04    15666 2021-07-04 00:00:11 2021-07-04 23:59:45
3 2021-07-05    15256 2021-07-05 00:00:21 2021-07-05 20:42:18

I have randomly checked few of them and it seems they are all uniswap, sushiswap transactions e.g.:

• 0x022b78488a7f6934055dbcff75a2661a0f74407b4096c8f5e2c55dbbe2cb85ad
• 0xa988d1d9d008e349e9565084b65a1a5cdf5d4eee5d1b1bfca021c9a81b2fa457

In any case, how is this possible? Miners being paid from some other channels to include those transactions? These are their own transactions?

Answer 1

I don't know exactly how is this done but, the trace here shows that there has been gas that was used for all actions.

But for your question on whether you can pay miners gas directly not via the usual gas system is a possibility, yes that is possible. you can check Gan Stations network or Flashbots's miner network. those two are protocols here you pay the miners in other ways like in tokens, or even fiat currency.