👀 WHY DID FEES GO UP ON THE SONGBIRD NETWORK?
It's the gas price on the Songbird network itself that went up — our ecosystem has nothing to do with it. This is part of a pre-planned reform of Flare's economics, not an outage and not network congestion.
Gas used to cost next to nothing, so transactions were practically free. Now the network is raising the gas price as part of the reform — to burn more of the token and bring inflation down. The full increase on Songbird takes effect on July 7, 2026; what we're seeing right now is the preparation phase, with gas prices climbing in advance 😢
Important: fees go to the network and its validators — not to the project.
Why claiming costs more than a regular transfer: a claim is not a single transaction, but a whole process (account verification → reward calculation → token distribution → writing to the blockchain). That's why it always requires more gas than a simple transfer. It just went unnoticed before, because gas was practically free.
Why does this affect Songbird if it's a Flare reform?
Songbird is Flare's "canary" network (like Kusama is for Polkadot). It's a fully live network with real value, where Flare battle-tests upgrades BEFORE rolling them out on the Flare mainnet.
They share the same codebase (the same go-flare client). So fee and protocol changes land on Songbird first — often earlier than on Flare itself.
The dates make it obvious: the new fee threshold activates on Songbird on July 7, 2026, but on Flare only on July 14. In other words, we get the price increase first, as the testing ground.
Bottom line: while the FIP.16 reform is formally about Flare's economics, it ships through shared code and network parameters — so it directly affects Songbird too.
For those who want the details:
Gas price. A week ago, gas on the network cost ~2 wei; now it's ~150 Gwei — roughly a 75-billion-fold increase per unit of gas. Today's network recommendation is ~slow 24 / avg 52 / fast 69 Gwei, and the app sets its price even above "fast" to make sure transactions go through.
What this means in real money. Gas consumption has NOT changed: a simple SGB transfer is ~21,000 units, a reward claim is ~225,000 units (about 10x more, because a claim is a full process, not a single operation). With gas now more expensive, a claim that used to cost a tiny fraction of a cent (~0.0000000005 SGB) now costs ~0.034 SGB.
Where the fees go. Right now the base fee is still close to zero and almost nothing is being burned — so the money goes to validators as a priority fee (a tip for including your transaction in a block), not into the burn. The full burn mechanism will activate later.
What the reform is. FIP.16 (approved April 24, 2026) raises the base fee ~20x — from 25 to 500 Gwei — via the go-flare v1.14.0 node upgrade and the ACP-176 dynamic fee mechanism. The goals: cut inflation from 5% to 3% per year and increase the annual token burn from ~7.5M to ~300M.
Timeline. The 500 Gwei minimum threshold on Songbird takes effect on July 7, 2026 — meaning the full increase is still ahead, and what's happening now is the preparatory ramp-up of gas prices.
No congestion. Network utilization is only ~1.85% — no outages, no attacks, no spam. This is a controlled, protocol-level price increase, not a malfunction.
Sources:
proposals.flare.network (FIP.16)
github.com/flare-foundation/go-flare (RELEASES)
