◼️Gas Optimization on ZONA

While ZONA Protocol offers ultra-low transaction fees thanks to its efficient Proof-of-Authority consensus and fast finality, optimizing gas usage in your smart contracts is still a best practice especially for high-volume dApps like DEXs, NFT mints, or GameFi platforms.

This section covers practical techniques to reduce on-chain costs and improve performance when deploying and interacting with smart contracts on ZONA.

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🔹 Why Optimize on ZONA?

• 🔄 Lower fees = Better UX for users

• 📉 Fewer state writes = Cheaper deployment and execution

• 🔐 Efficient contracts = Less attack surface

• 🔧 Scalable logic = Better suited for long-term protocol growth

Even with ZONA’s low gas fees, unoptimized contracts can:

• Bloat blocks unnecessarily

• Cost more to upgrade or migrate later

• Limit composability and performance

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🧠 Optimization Techniques

1. 📦 Use uint256 for Consistency

Always prefer uint256 over smaller types like uint8 or uint32 unless you're packing multiple variables into a struct.

uint256 public totalSupply; // ✅ Good

Using the native word size avoids unnecessary conversions.

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2. 🔁 Minimize Writes Inside Loops

Every SSTORE operation (writing to storage) is expensive. Avoid writing to state variables in loops.

❌ Avoid:

for (uint256 i = 0; i < users.length; i++) {
    balances[users[i]] = 0;
}

✅ Prefer:

function clearBalance(address user) external {
    balances[user] = 0;
}

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3. 🔐 Use external Instead of public

For functions not called internally, use external it's cheaper for calldata handling.

function mint(address to, uint256 amount) external onlyOwner {
    _mint(to, amount);
}

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4. 🧾 Pack Structs Smartly

Place variables of the same type together to allow for efficient storage packing.

struct User {
    uint128 balance;
    uint128 points;
}

Rather than mixing types like uint128 and bool which can cause alignment padding.

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5. 🗂 Reuse Storage Efficiently

If your contract uses mappings or arrays, try to minimize dynamic writes and prefer mapping(address => uint256) over arrays for state tracking.

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6. 🔍 Leverage view and pure Functions

Functions that don’t alter the state should be explicitly declared as view or pure. These cost no gas when called off-chain.

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7. 📤 Emit Events Instead of Logging On-Chain

Rather than storing data on-chain unnecessarily, use event logs which are cheaper and easily indexable off-chain.

event UserRegistered(address indexed user);

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✅ Gas-Efficient Design Mindset

• Cache frequently used storage variables in memory

• Minimize require() calls with complex expressions

• Avoid unnecessary inheritance or modifiers when not needed

• Consider OpenZeppelin’s lightweight versions (ERC20Votes, Ownable, etc.)

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🧪 Tooling

Use these tools to benchmark and analyze gas usage:

• Hardhat Gas Reporter

• Tenderly

• Solidity Visual Auditor

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Building on ZONA means you can do more but building smart means you can do it better.