Crypto Isn’t Cheap (Until You Operate It That Way)
We assumed crypto was cheap - until fee subsidies piled up. Chain fee models vary, so costs can hide in plain sight. Staking + a cost-per-withdrawal KPI helped us cut the burden big time.
Key Idea
Crypto isn’t automatically cheap. It's only cheap if you measure and manage on-chain costs. Staking turned a “silent” operational expense (like fee subsidies) into a controllable lever, proving that saving money can be just as powerful as making money.
A lot of people assume crypto is cheap. Fees are “just gas,” and compared to traditional rails it feels like the cost should be close to zero. In real products though, that belief can be misleading not because crypto is broken, but because each chain behaves differently, and small per-transaction costs can quietly stack up into a real monthly expense.
The first surprise is that protocols don’t price activity the same way. Tron (TRX) has its own resource model (energy/bandwidth), while EVM chains price execution in gas and can swing with congestion and data costs. Even within EVM, things keep changing as upgrades roll out and make certain operations cheaper over time. The point is: “crypto is cheap” isn’t a rule — it’s a moving target.
Our wake-up call came from a very specific place: withdrawal fees. To keep withdrawals smooth for users, we were covering fees ourselves. It was overlooked because it’s “crypto is cheap”… but across thousands of withdrawals, it became one of those costs you only notice when you pay enogu attention.
What made it click was switching from total spend to one simple metric: cost per withdrawal (total fees covered divided by the number of withdrawals). Once we tracked it that way, optimization became obvious. After we introduced staking, our cost per withdrawal dropped sharply and over the following months it ended up roughly ~60% lower than our baseline.
The bigger takeaway isn’t “staking assets to earn more.” It’s that saving money is also making money mind set which often get underappreciated, when the cost is recurring. On-chain products don’t just have “gas,” they have operational costs; withdrawals, contract calls, relayers, retries, monitoring, the whole boring bundle. If you don’t measure it, you don’t manage it, and you’ll end up paying more for it than you think.
Crypto can absolutely be efficient but it’s not automatically cheap. In the end, the teams that win aren’t the ones who only chase revenue. They’re the ones who also treat cost like a product problem, and design their operations to scale.