News · Learn · November 14, 2026

What one transfer costs on 12 chains, measured Nov 14

We measured a simple transfer on 11 chains and a USDT transfer on Tron. Most cost under one cent; Bitcoin and Tron USDT do not. Method, table and limits.

DRIVE 369 DAO · 4 min read

For a plain transfer, most of the twelve networks we measured cost under one US cent in this snapshot, taken on November 14, 2026 at about 13:04 UTC: Ethereum L1 about half a cent, Base's execution fee and Solana a few hundredths of a cent, Bitcoin about nine cents at the recommended rate, and a USDT transfer on Tron a few dollars when the sender burns TRX for energy. This is one snapshot, taken from public nodes by us; fees move with demand. The method and the limits are below.

What we measured

How we measured

• EVM chains: the node's gas price times 21,000 gas, the cost of a plain native transfer, read from public RPC endpoints (Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum One, Optimism, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche).
• Layer 2s (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism): the figures are the execution fee only. They leave out the fee for posting data to Ethereum, so real totals are higher.
• Bitcoin: the recommended half-hour rate from mempool.space times a typical 140 virtual bytes.
• Solana: the protocol's base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature plus the priority fee from recent slots, which was zero at the median.
• TON: the median total fee of 26 recent sender-side small transactions (those that came from outside the chain) among the latest 100 on toncenter. It covers all small sender-side transactions, not only wallet transfers. Counting both sides of every transfer gives a lower figure, about 0.00014 to 0.00007 TON, because the receiving side costs very little.
• Sui: the computation floor only. Sui's gas documentation sets the smallest bucket at 1,000 computation units; the reference price (100 MIST) we read from the network's GraphQL endpoint. Storage fees come on top, and most can be refunded when data is deleted.
• Tron: we read 11 recent USDT transactions: they used 64,285 to 130,285 energy, with a median of 99,764. At the network's 100 sun per energy this is 6.4 to 13.0 TRX if burned. Tron's resource model gives each account 600 free bandwidth a day, no free energy, and burns TRX when staked resources run out.
• Prices: converted to dollars with CoinGecko prices at the same minute (a secondary source): ETH 1,896, BTC 66,903, SOL 75.55, TON 1.09, TRX 0.313, SUI 0.764, BNB 612, POL 0.083, AVAX 7.99.

What it means

Cheap is no longer a rare feature: eight of twelve rows are under a tenth of a cent, though four of them (the three layer 2s and Sui) leave part of the fee out. The two that stand out are Bitcoin and stablecoin transfers on Tron without staked energy. Price tells you little about what a network is for. A fee is also how an open network keeps strangers from filling it with spam; a network with no fee has to limit who can write some other way.

Where Ghostdrive stands

• 369 Ledger (testnet): zero gas, no gas token, but only accounts admitted by name can write. That is how it avoids spam, and it is why the zero is not comparable to the rows above, where anyone can send. See what 369 Ledger is and what it does not prove.
• The DAO (testnet): voting runs on Base Sepolia, where fees are paid in test ETH from a free faucet. Test coins have no value, and the contracts' audit is pending. How to vote.
• Mainnet: planned for March 6, 2027 after an external audit. We have not measured a fee for it, and we will not promise one.

Limits

One snapshot at one minute; fees can rise many times over in a busy hour. Layer 2 and Sui rows are partial. The Tron USDT range comes from 11 transactions. Dollar values depend on a secondary price feed. Nothing here is investment advice.

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