ETH gas spike alerts: know before you overpay

What is an ETH gas spike?

Every Ethereum transaction competes for space in the next block (how gas works). Users attach a gas fee — priced in gwei — to signal how urgently they want their transaction included. When demand for block space suddenly surges, this fee climbs.

The scale has changed. Since the Dencun upgrade in March 2024 (EIP-4844), and with much of the activity moved to layer-2 networks, the Ethereum base fee sits far lower than it used to. Over the 30 days to 26 September 2026 (base fee sampled about every five minutes) its median was 0.085 gwei and its 99.9th percentile 3.3 gwei. Single blocks spike higher than a five-minute sample catches: in that same month individual blocks reached about 24 gwei. The 100-gwei gas wars of the NFT-mint years are not what congestion looks like now: today it is a jump from about 0.1 gwei to a few gwei.

In dollar terms a few gwei is still a small fee. What a spike tells you is that blocks are full and transactions are competing for them — worth knowing before you send something that has to land in a specific block.

What Darkmen tracks

The ETH Gas Spikes module fires on either of two conditions, each of which has to hold for a sustained 10 minutes:

• gas stays above 3 gwei, or
• gas stays at 4× or more of its baseline — the median of the preceding hour — and at least 1 gwei.

The 1-gwei floor keeps a jump from 0.05 to 0.2 gwei, which is noise, from counting as congestion. Each alert includes:

• The current gas price in gwei
• How long the level has held
• The normal level it is measured against, when the relative trigger fired

The alert reports numbers, not a cause: it does not say whether a mint, a bot or a whale is behind the spike.

How the alert works

Once gas has held above a bar for 10 minutes, Darkmen pushes an alert to your connected channels. No dashboards to check, no refreshing a gas tracker tab. One episode sends one alert; the next one can only fire after gas has come back down.

How to use it:

• About to send something that is not urgent? A spike alert is a reason to look at the fee again before you sign.
• The alert says how long gas has held and, on a relative spike, what normal was — the gap between the two is the measure of how congested the chain is right now.
• The 10-minute hold means a single busy block does not trigger it: by the time the alert arrives, the chain has been congested for a while.

Tier & channels

ETH Gas Spikes is a Pro module. Alerts are delivered through whichever channels you connect: Telegram or the live web feed. Enable multiple channels so the spike reaches you wherever you are when it matters.

See full tier details on the pricing page.