Ethereum Fees Race Towards $10 Per Transaction

The ethereum blockchain has become very expensive with network fees reaching all time high and by far, giving miners some $7 million a day, 7x more than for bitcoin miners.

Average transaction fees are now nearly double that of the very peak in January 2018, standing at $5.67 per transaction on average.

That was for yesterday, today they’ve increased further from 200 gwei to 300 gwei per simple transaction.

While simple transactions may still be cheap at $3 or $4, contract transactions are becoming very expensive with an etherean claiming he was asked to pay $600 in eth fees.

4Chan has a screenshot, which unfortunately we didn’t save, of being asked to pay 0.3 eth in gas fees, about $120.

When we tried to testrun Yam, we were asked to pay about $9 just to give the contract permission.

We didn’t go ahead with it because by the time we got to the deposit stage, all the test-run funds would have run out, so considering what happened after with Yam, there may well be some small benefits to these high fees.

This used to be just 20 gwei but defi has now taken over with Uniswap being the top gas users.

That’s an onchain permissionless broker where all sorts of tokens are traded with its volumes skyrocketing.

Because of this froth, plenty are seemingly happy to pay these high fees because of all the token giveaways in the hope they make a profit anyway.

However, some claim it now costs $40 even to enter a second layer, like Loopring, with it unclear what miners plan to do.

They seemingly want to increase it maybe to 15 million as uncle rates are still very low, but last time they got shouted at by the Geth maintainer.

So the pressure is primarily on dapp developers to get second layers, but that takes time, skill and effort.

Meaning miners could increase capacity a bit as ethereum is not even running at 2MB per ten minutes like bitcoin, but that would be just buying time which is just what we need as we wait for ethereum to go Proof of Stake by being merged with eth2 hopefully next summer according to Danny Ryan, the ethereum 2.0 coordinator.

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