A deep reinforcement learning approach for dynamic transaction fee adjustment in Ethereum

Blockchain users pay transaction fees to miners or block proposers who validate and add transactions to the distributed ledger. Ethereum introduces the concept of gas to decouple transaction costs from Ether’s price volatility, calculating fees based on gas units. The current mechanism defined by Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 dynamically adjusts the base fee according to block gas usage. However, its rule-based adjustment can lead to unstable gas consumption when demand fluctuates within a narrow range and struggles to respond efficiently to sudden demand spikes, such as during non-fungible token (NFT) drops. To address these limitations, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based transaction fee mechanism that learns an adaptive base-fee update policy. Our approach maintains gas consumption close to the target level across various demand scenarios and stabilizes transaction fees and gas usage per block even under abrupt demand shifts. These results demonstrate that the proposed method provides a more adaptive and resilient fee adjustment mechanism compared to the current EIP-1559 model.