Where gas fees actually go and who gets paid when you transact
You send a transaction. You pay a fee. The wallet shows a number, Etherscan shows a number, but neither of them keeps a cent. That money goes somewhere else entirely.
It is a common myth that block explorers or wallet providers collect gas fees. They do not. Etherscan does not skim your transaction. MetaMask does not take a cut. Those tools show you the fee breakdown; they are not the recipients.
Gas fees have two components, and they go to two different places. One gets burned. One gets paid to a specific person.
The base fee
Every Ethereum transaction pays a base fee, the minimum price per unit of gas required to get your transaction included. The amount fluctuates with network congestion. EIP-1559 introduced this mechanism in 2021.
The base fee is destroyed. Completely. Irreversibly. It is sent to a burn address - a wallet with no private key that nobody controls. No one can spend it. No one can retrieve it. The ether is gone forever.
This burning reduces the total supply of ETH. When more is burned than issued through staking rewards, the supply shrinks. That is deflationary pressure. But the key fact is this: the base fee pays nobody.
The priority fee
Every transaction also includes a priority fee, sometimes called a tip or miner tip. On Ethereum proof-of-stake, this goes to the block proposer - the validator who built the block containing your transaction.
The priority fee is optional in theory. In practice, you need to pay one to get your transaction included quickly, because validators choose which transactions to include and they pick the ones with higher tips. If you set a zero tip, your transaction may sit pending for a long time.
So the priority fee is a direct payment from you to the validator who ordered your transaction. They keep it all.
Block explorers and wallets
Neither Etherscan nor your wallet touches these funds. They are intermediaries: they query the blockchain and display the data. Their revenue comes from other sources - premium API subscriptions, advertising, enterprise licenses - not from your transaction fees.
If you look at the gas tab on Etherscan's transaction page, you see exactly two numbers: base fee and priority fee. The total is what you paid. The base fee is burned, the priority fee goes to the validator, and zero goes to Etherscan.
How it works on L2s
Layer-2 networks operate differently. Most use a sequencer, which collects transactions, orders them, and posts batches of data to Ethereum L1.
On L2s like Arbitrum or Optimism, part of your fee goes to the sequencer. They handle the work of ordering and executing your transaction, and they charge a fee for that service.
The other part of the L2 fee covers posting data to L1. Every batch of L2 transactions must be submitted to Ethereum as calldata, and that L1 submission itself costs gas. The base fee on L1 is burned. The priority fee on L1 goes to the L1 validator. So on L2s, your fee splits three ways: sequencer fee, L1 base fee (burned), and L1 priority fee (to the L1 validator). The breakdown depends on the specific L2 and current L1 congestion.
The takeaway
Gas fees are not a tax collected by some central entity. They are a market mechanism. You pay for computation and for ordering. The base fee is destroyed. The priority fee rewards the validator. On L2s, the sequencer gets a cut for their service.
Next time you see a gas fee on Etherscan, look at the breakdown. The burn address is real. The validator address is real. Nobody in the middle is pocketing your money.
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