What Is Gas Limit?
Definition
Gas limit is the maximum amount of gas units you're willing to spend on an Ethereum/Base transaction — it prevents runaway costs if a smart contract execution is unexpectedly complex.
On Ethereum and Base, every transaction has a gas limit. If the transaction uses less gas than the limit, you only pay for what was used. If it exceeds the limit, the transaction reverts and you still pay the gas consumed up to the failure point.
- Gas limit — maximum gas units (e.g., 200,000 units)
- Gas price — cost per unit in gwei (e.g., 20 gwei)
- Total fee = gas used × gas price
- Token creation (ERC-20 deployment): ~2,000,000 gas units
- Add liquidity: ~300,000 gas units
- Renounce ownership: ~50,000 gas units
- Burn tokens: ~80,000 gas units
MetaMask and other wallets estimate gas limits automatically. You rarely need to set them manually — the wallet's default estimation works for standard operations.
On Solana, the concept is different: instead of gas limits, you set "compute units" and optional "priority fees." CoinDevTools handles both automatically.