Ethereum gas fees and the impacts of Berlin hardfork

One of the essential differences between Ethereum and Bitcoin is a Turing complete virtual machine or EVM. This machine turns the blockchain into a decentralized computing platform and is responsible for the state transition. Any transaction in Ethereum leads to a change in the current state. For example, transferring one ETH to a new wallet changes balances of a sender and receiver, which transitions the blockchain to a new state.

However, EVM allows changing state not only by transferring Ether but also by executing code in smart contracts. For this reason, it is more difficult to estimate the cost of adding a transaction to an Ethereum block than Bitcoin. Instead of paying for each byte of data added to the blockchain, fees are charged per the calculations performed. The abstract unit of measurement for computation in Ethereum is gas, in which each existing operation (opcode) of the EVM is evaluated.