Gas Fees

A gas fee is what you pay to have a blockchain process your transaction. It compensates the validators who run the computation and, crucially, it is priced by live demand for limited block space — not by the size of what you are sending.

That is why fees spike when the network is busy: everyone is bidding for the same scarce slots. Sending $5 or $5 million of the same token costs roughly the same gas, but sending during a frenzy can cost many times more than sending an hour later. On congested networks, a small transfer can cost more in gas than the amount being sent.