Gas economics
Fidemark inherits its on-chain economics from Ethereum Attestation Service on Base L2. There’s no protocol fee on top: callers pay only the L2 gas required to execute their transaction.
Per-operation gas usage
Section titled “Per-operation gas usage”Gas usage is deterministic: independent of the network’s fee level or ETH spot price. Phase-2 implementation, FidemarkResolver with indexed contentHash:
| Operation | Gas |
|---|---|
| Schema registration (one-time, paid by Fidemark) | ~250,000 |
| Single Human Proof attestation | ~380,000 |
| Single AI Proof attestation | ~370,000 |
| Revocation | ~85,000 |
| Off-chain attestation (EIP-712 signature) | 0 |
ETH cost (price-stable)
Section titled “ETH cost (price-stable)”Base mainnet base fee fluctuates. Three regimes you’ll see in practice (April 2026 reference):
| Regime | Effective gas price | ETH per attestation (380k gas) |
|---|---|---|
| Off-peak (nights, weekends) | ~1 Mwei (0.001 GWEI) | ~3.8 × 10⁻⁷ ETH |
| Typical | ~10 Mwei (0.01 GWEI) | ~3.8 × 10⁻⁶ ETH |
| Heavy congestion | ~100 Mwei (0.1 GWEI) | ~3.8 × 10⁻⁵ ETH |
USD at $2,300 ETH (April 2026 spot)
Section titled “USD at $2,300 ETH (April 2026 spot)”| Regime | Single attestation | Schema registration | Revocation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Off-peak | ~$0.001 | ~$0.0006 | ~$0.0002 |
| Typical | ~$0.009 | ~$0.006 | ~$0.002 |
| Heavy congestion | ~$0.09 | ~$0.06 | ~$0.02 |
USD figures track ETH price linearly. To project at a different price, multiply each USD figure by
current ETH price ÷ 2300.
Optimization runway
Section titled “Optimization runway”The resolver’s per-attestation gas can likely drop to ~250–280k by:
- Switching the
proofMethodfield fromstringtobytes32(saves the keccak256 + SLOAD round-trip on the allowlist check. Schema-breaking) would ship as a v2 schema with a new resolver. - Trimming a few SLOADs by caching the schema discriminator earlier in
onAttest.
Together: ~25–35% gas reduction. Deferred until real-world numbers warrant the migration cost.
When gas matters and when it doesn’t
Section titled “When gas matters and when it doesn’t”- High-volume pipelines (every model output, every page load): use off-chain attestations: zero gas, brought on-chain only when needed.
- One-shot certifications (an article, a release artifact, an AI agent’s daily output): on-chain at typical fees is fine: under a cent.
- Compliance/audit trails: typically off-chain with selective on-chain anchoring, since EU AI Act records don’t need every attestation on a public chain.
The protocol design reflects this: Phase-2 ships both flows from one SDK so callers can pick per use case.