How do gas tokens, batching, and compression reduce transaction cost?

Gas tokens work like prepaying gas; you mint when gas is cheap and burn during a tx to reclaim some gas back. In practice, on Ethereum mainnet the refunds were slashed by EIP-3529, so the savings are tiny or non-existent; I tried GST2/CHI and after the change it felt like paying the same or more gas. So I rarely rely on gas tokens anymore.

Batching is the big one. you cram several actions into a single tx, so you pay one base fee and amortize the per-call costs. In a project I batch six ERC-20 operations; we cut gas per action by ~50% but one failed step sank the whole batch.

Compression = shrinking calldata and storage. Pack booleans into a uint256, use fixed-size types, and prefer abi.encodePacked where safe. I cut heavy storage by 20-30%.

From my experience, gas tokens let you prepay gas when prices are cheap and redeem it later, lowering effective costs during spikes. Batching several operations into one transaction spreads the fixed tx overhead across more work, cutting unit gas per action. Compression helps by shrinking calldata; using concise payloads and minimal ABI saves gas. I used these together on a DEX bulk-swap and saved ~30-50% during high-fee periods.

I tried gas tokens, batching my swaps, and compressing calldata, each step shaved gas; I saved about 30-40% on my typical tx.