The Cost of Delay: Evidence from the Ethereum Transaction Fee Market

Abstract

Delays in finance impose real costs, yet they are difficult to measure in traditional settings. Leveraging Ethereum's on-chain data and fee market, I estimate a structural queuing model that maps fee bids to time preferences and quantify delay costs in decentralized finance. The median transaction bears a 7.1 bps implicit cost, with costs highly skewed and totaling $9.88 million per day. Counterfactuals show that a flexible block gas limit as in EIP-1559 cuts the loss from delay by 32.9%, and doubling block frequency with half-size blocks cuts it by 13.6%. Combined, the two policies reduce losses by a striking 63.9%.