The average transaction fees on Ethereum went above USD 7.5. The expenditure on fees is led by protocols like Uniswap and the stablecoin Tether.
Between August 12th and 13th, transaction fees on the Ethereum network reached an all-time high. Currently, a transaction on Ethereum can cost over USD 7 worth of fees on average.
According to data from Blockchair, there was an average above USD 7.5 per transaction on August 13th, which is well above the USD 5.4 averaged on August 12th. These data confirm users’ complaints of high fee costs to send a few US cents on Ethereum.
There has been a sustained rebound in transaction fee amounts on Ethereum in recent weeks. The excitement about decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms may be, to a large extent, responsible for this increase.
One of the most prominent cases is that of Uniswap, at the time of writing this article. The Etherscan explorer reflects that this protocol is responsible for almost 18% of the Gas (unit of measure for fees on Ethereum) that users have spent on the network in one day.
The increase in processing fees on August 12th also led to the highest expenditure in the network’s history. According to data from CoinMetrics, there was more than USD 6.87 million worth of transaction fees.
Besides the token-exchange protocol Uniswap, the stablecoin Tether (USDT) contract has moved more than 10% of the Gas on Ethereum in recent hours, which maintains high levels of activity on the network.
Potential Ponzi Scheme and Increased Activity
In the last few hours, Etherscan also highlights a platform that has a warning as a potential Ponzi scheme among the contracts with the highest expenditure on fees.
The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission recently reported Forsage, a website that presents itself as a crowdfunding platform, as a fraudulent scheme. In the last few hours, Forsage has moved 2.18% of the fees on Ethereum.
Fees increase as the number of daily transactions approaches levels not seen since January 2018, right after the biggest bullish run in the history of the cryptocurrency market. At that time, Ethereum’s cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH), went above USD 1,350.
Data from Etherscan show that there have been more than 1,200,000 daily transactions on the network in recent days, even exceeding 1,280,000 on August 10th. The all-time high to date is 1,349,890, which occurred on January 4th, 2018.
A recurring concern on the Ethereum network is precisely that of the cost of transactions. In January 2018, it was already possible to see high levels of transaction fees.
Before the Istanbul hard fork, which occurred at the end of 2019, there were already initiatives that sought to reduce fees to trade on the network.
The steady increases in recent months have stimulated the interest in seeking mechanisms to reduce fees. It is recently possible to find the EIP-1559 and Escalator improvement proposals.
These proposals take into account changing the current mechanism to adjust rates based on the network’s current demand. Likewise, they seek to establish a range of free offers for each transaction, establishing a maximum that users can willingly pay.
By Alexander Salazar
