What are transaction fees and why do I need to pay them?
Any transaction made with Safe incurs transaction fees. This includes:
Asset transfers
Settings changes (adding an owner, changing the threshold, etc.)
DeFi Interactions (swapping tokens, locking funds in a DeFi protocol)
These transaction fees do not go to Safe, but instead directly to the miner of the blockchain network.
Who has to pay transaction fees?
Safe is often used by teams to manage digital assets collectively. This raises the question by whom / how the transaction fee is paid if there are multiple signers involved. Today, the transaction fee is paid by the signer that executes a transaction (usually the last signer to reach the required threshold of signatures). So while pure confirmations in Safe do not incur any transaction fees, the executing signature will have to also include the full transaction fee required for the underlying transaction / DeFi interaction.
Can I pay transaction fees from the Safe directly?
With gas prices on Ethereum rising, this way of paying transaction fees using one of the signer keys becomes less viable. As this requires distributing significant funds to the signer keys to pay for fees. We understand that it would be preferable to pay the transaction fees directly using funds stored on a Safe. While this is not technically trivial, we are currently working on a feature that leverages transaction relaying in order to pay fees directly from a Safe.