Any transaction sent on Ethereum will vary in confirmation time depending on the gas price that is set by the transacting user. Without digging too deeply into the mechanisms that drive Ethereum, miners are incentivised to mine high gas price transactions before they mine low gas price transactions — therefore if a user sets a high gas price their transactions is more likely to be placed in the next block.

For Chainlink oracles that are writing their answers on-chain, the gas price it uses will determine how soon a smart contract or decentralised application receives that data. For data-connected Ethereum applications to smoothly scale and for Dapp users to have a succinct and seamless experience, it is important that Chainlink oracles respond to requests for data as soon as possible.

For an oracle to respond within the first block after receiving a request, it will have to set a high enough gas price so that their transaction is placed within the next block. To determine an appropriate price to set, there are many effective resources out there such as Concourse Open Community’s Eth Gas Station, which provides gas prices that statistically correlate to certain speeds of transactions measured in blocks.

The current ‘FAST’ transaction gas price recommendation on: Eth Gas Station

How Gas Price Effects Oracle Reputation

The Reputation System and individual reputation of an oracle is one security implementation proposed in the Chainlink whitepaper that theoretically incentivises good behaviour which results in highly performant oracles. The response time of an oracle is a metric that can be analysed when determining a Reputation Score. Since gas price can be analysed on-chain its value can be used to determine the response time reputation metric of an oracle.

Fast response times will result in a higher reputation, therefore oracles are intangibly incentivised to set a gas price that will confirm their transaction on Ethereum as soon as possible. A high reputation oracle is likely to be in higher demand and get paid more per job as well as being selected for more jobs than a low reputation oracle. Therefore, by sacrificing more gas per transaction in the present, oracles will likely achieve higher future utility. One solution to automatically ensure fast response times, which subsequently bolsters reputation, is using a Chainlink Gas Updater.