Intraday Gas Fee Heterogeneity on Ethereum: Evidence from Operational Firms

Abstract

Ethereum's EIP-1559 fee mechanism was designed under the assumption of homogeneous, myopic agents responding to a single congestion signal. We examine how this assumption interacts with the heterogeneous demand structure of real-world Ethereum users. Analyzing 62,142 confirmed transactions from seven operational firms across seven industries (January--March 2026), we document significant intraday gas-fee variation: fees peak at hour~12 UTC (7\,AM ET, $\hat{\beta}_{12}=\$0.054$ above the U.S.\ evening baseline, $p<0.001$) and are associated with periods of elevated speculative-arbitrage activity. Operational firms exhibit heterogeneous scheduling responses moderated by transaction deferrability and gas intensity. Residual cost floors, i.e. the gap between observed expenditure and the counterfactual under perfect off-peak scheduling, range from 40.7\% to 92.5\% of actual expenditure, and persist even during the lowest-cost hours ($h\in\{20,21,22,23\}$ UTC, 3--6\,PM ET). We introduce an On-Chain Scheduling Matrix that maps firms to four scheduling regimes as a practical framework for managing gas-fee exposure under the current mechanism.