Transaction fee forecasting in post EIP-1559 Ethereum using 1-D Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies have established their identity as a healthy alternative to the maintenance of digital assets. Their applications include low-cost money transfers and yield farming. Ethereum is a blockchain that provides the functionality of doing more than a transaction regarding cryptocurrency. Ether is the default cryptocurrency of Ethereum, which is issued to the miners after the successful completion of the consensus mechanism to avoid fraudulent miners gaining profits. Transactions in Ether require that the user should include what is called a “fee” besides the amount that is sent by the user. The EIP-1559 (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) upgrade to the Ethereum protocol has substantially changed how the transaction fee is calculated. Since this transaction data can be considered time-series data, many prior approaches have been proposed to forecast such a transaction fee using suitable methods effectively. One-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks have recently been successfully applied to time-series forecasting problems, showing promising results. This paper proposes a univariate 1-D CNN for an effective forecast of transaction fees in the new Ethereum protocol. Furthermore, this paper also compares the proposed method with existing standard approaches, and the results show the superior performance of simple 1-dimensional convolutional neural networks over existing hybrid models.