Effect on Gas Fee from Eth Merge and expected time to see changes

Question

I am working on an NFT project for a client and I would like to know if I should wait to deploy the smart contracts to the mainnet for lesser gas fee as it is a financially restricted project and every dollar counts.

The merge was successful and shift from PoW to PoS will reduce energy consumption and provide with more transaction verifications per minute (I'm hoping I am right here!). But would it reduce Gas cost for deploying contracts on the mainnet?

And if it will, will it be a gradual shift to lesser costs?

Answer 1

No! Proof of stake is just another consensus mechanism like proof of work. It is not a scaling method in any way. The only remarkable benefit of POS is that it'll reduce power consumption.

And also the TPS won't increase either.

To increase TPS and reduce gas fee, we need horizontal scaling methods such as sharding(which ethereum foundation is working right now).

So I would say it is better to deploy the contract while minding the network traffic and with less gas fee since you said you are financially restricted.

Great place to track the gas fee.

Tell me if it helps!

You can read about POS more here.

Answer 2

There is a great blog post here

The Merge did not lower gas fees directly. There was nothing built into the technical upgrades of The Merge that would specifically lower fees. However, what it did accomplish was to create the technical environment necessary for future gas optimizations.

Activating PoS was the first step toward enabling sharding. This upgrade will allow the network to be split into “shard chains” that share the load of Ethereum, theoretically reducing congestion and increasing transaction throughput. Sharding is planned to begin in 2023 and should enable giant leaps in scalability for the network.

Once implemented, sharding could theoretically increase Ethereum’s transaction throughput up to 100,000 transactions per second—higher throughput than all leading credit card companies.

Sharding will work in conjunction with Ethereum’s “rollup centric” roadmap. The Ethereum Foundation states that “given the rise and success of layer 2 technologies to scale transaction execution, sharding plans have shifted to finding the most optimal way to distribute the burden of storing compressed calldata from rollup contracts, allowing for exponential growth in network capacity.”

These innovations enabling thriving layer 2 ecosystems will be what fundamentally lowers gas fees for normal users of Ethereum. The layer 1 chain will be able to focus on decentralization, while layer 2 chains will allow users to take advantage of base layer security with minimal transaction fees.