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I will show you how to use Balancer.fi to convert ETH to WETH with lowest Ethereum Gas fees. Balance is a very popular DEFI exchange or DEX for short that can be used to provide liquidity and earn great interest rates. I needed to convert my Ethereum (ETH) into WETH for purchasing ERC20 token in Sushiswap later. ERC-20 is a standard developed after the release of ETH that defines how tokens are transferred and how to keep a consistent record of those transfers among tokens in the Ethereum Network. When you "wrap" ETH, you aren't really wrapping so much as trading via a smart contract for an equal token called wETH. If you want to get plain ETH back you need to "unwrap" it. AKA trade it back for plain ETH. The reason you need wETH is to be able to trade ETH for other ERC-20 tokens on decentralized platforms in my case Sushiswap.
First connect your METAMASK wallet to Balancer. Select the Ethereum network because WETH is tokenized Etereum on Ethereum network. If you do not know how to setup MetaMask as your default Web 3 wallet to all your tokens, I will provide a link below on detail setup. Select the first pair as ETH with your balance. My balance was 0.0234 ETH. However, I only swap 0.01 ETH to account for ETH gas fee.
How to Reduce Gas Fees on MetaMask Web Wallet on Balancer
MetaMask is the Web 3 wallet of choice for Balancer. MetaMask by default sets Ethereum Gas limits very. You should use etherscan.io/gastracker to look up current high gas fees. In this example it was 296 Gwei. Gas fee change with time. In order to reducing gas fees on MetaMask, go to Details section of Metamask transcation. Click on Edit. Click on Edit suggested gas fee. Here you are going to change the default expensive MetaMask gas fees. Do not change the default Gaslimits. Change the Max Priority Fee to 2 Gwei. This is the priority fee given straight to miners on EIP1559. Next change the Max Fee to what fast fee in Gwei given by Etherscan.io/gastracker. MetaMask default is 398 Gwei but current Etherscan is 199 Gwei. This changes with time. Do not go below the Slow or your transcation will fail with you losing the gas fee. There is no way to claim lost gas fees. It is gone for ever. So make sure you do not set Max fee to low that is suggested by Etherscan.
Ethereum Gas fees Based on Time and Day of Week
Gas prices, in general, are higher during the work week and lower on Saturdays and Sundays. The busiest times and most expensive times are from 8 AM to 1 PM (EST). This is because Europe and the US are all fully awake and at work. However, least busy time is between midnight to 4 AM (EST) the time when people in the US are asleep, Europe is just about to start their day, and people in Asia finishing up their workday. You can use those times to even further reduce your gas fees.
Here is a detail explanation of Balancer.fi in this video:
