All good things come at a cost—and in this case, skyrocketing prices across the crypto market have also triggered an equally steep rise in Ethereum gas fees.
On Ethereum, massive levels of network traffic pushed gas fees beyond 174 gwei by midday Monday according to Etherscan, incurring significant costs for traders attempting to complete various types of transactions within the blockchain’s ecosystem.
To give an indication of the severity of the gas fee uptick: The average charge to complete a typical NFT transaction on Ethereum eclipsed $372.29 at certain points on Monday. This means users, even if they were swapping profile pictures (PFPs) among friends for free, would have to pay hundreds of dollars just to see those transactions completed.
Swapping tokens on Ethereum cost almost as much at several points on Monday, upwards of $220 per transaction. Such prohibitively expensive fees potentially eliminate the value of certain crypto transactions, as the costs could eliminate any potential profits from flipping tokens.
Ethereum Hits $3,500 Just Days Before Dencun Upgrade
Ethereum is starting the week having inched its way past $3,500, marking a 3% gain since this time yesterday, according to CoinGecko data. At the time of writing, the Ethereum price is $3,506.38, which means that ETH has gained 15% in the past week. This is the highest Ethereum has been since January 2022, when it was coming down from the late 2021 bull run. And 91% of ETH held in wallets is now in the money. That means all but 9% of ETH has appreciated in value since it was purchased, according...
Borrowing on Ethereum cost above $186 per transaction at certain points on Monday; attempting to escape such steep prices by bridging funds from Ethereum to another blockchain cost over $70 on average.
In the last 24 hours, the largest gas guzzler in the Ethereum ecosystem has been Uniswap, a protocol for trading fungible ERC-20 tokens. Over $4.2 million worth of ETH has been burned completing transactions on the platform in the last day.
The uptick in exorbitant on-chain surcharges comes as cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin—as well as on-chain assets like NFTs—are experiencing massive surges in value.
How Much Cheaper Will Dencun Really Make the Ethereum Ecosystem?
On March 13, Ethereum is set to undergo its latest network upgrade, Dencun. While the event has certainly stirred excitement among the network’s die-hard tech enthusiasts, it has generated relatively little mainstream buzz in contrast to the 2022 merge, which transitioned Ethereum to the more energy-efficient proof-of-stake model. Make no mistake, though: According to the developers responsible for running the largest layer-2 networks built atop Ethereum, Dencun will constitute a seismic event i...
On Monday morning, ETH hit $3,500 for the first time since the start of 2022. Minutes later, an Ethereum-based CryptoPunks NFT sold for a whopping $16.03 million worth of ETH, the second-highest price ever fetched by a piece in the popular PFP collection.
The gas fee surge also comes just days before Ethereum’s much-anticipated Dencun upgrade, which is set to substantially reduce transaction costs on Ethereum layer-2 scaling networks via a novel data storage method called proto-danksharding.
Someone Just Bought a CryptoPunks NFT for $16 Million in Ethereum
An anonymous individual purchased a CryptoPunks NFT for over $16 million worth of cryptocurrency on Monday, in the second-largest transaction for a CryptoPunk ever recorded. For a whopping 4,500 ETH—worth $16.03 million at the time of sale—an Ethereum user whose identity has yet to be revealed purchased CryptoPunk #3100 just after 9:30 am EST this morning. The user’s wallet was created only four days ago, and used exclusively to purchase the NFT. CryptoPunk #3100 is one of only nine Alien Punk...
Several layer-2 developers recently told Decrypt that they anticipate Dencun will so significantly reduce gas fees in the Ethereum ecosystem, that the concept of such charges may soon become obsolete.
“We’re going to enter a world where most users are just not going to experience gas at all,” Polygon Labs VP of Product David Silverman previously told Decrypt, “and it becomes abstracted away.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
