Ethereum Gas Fees Continue to Soar, Will the “Ethereum Killers” Win?

Ethereum is one of the most widely used blockchains in the Crypto space, with new users joining every day. During this process, the issue of Ethereum fees has been attracting much attention.

Fee rates typically rise when the network is highly congested, and recently, as NFTs have grown in popularity, fees appear to have once again spiraled out of control.

Because minting NFTs takes a lot of time, Ethereum transaction fees have risen in order to complete this process, which has also pushed ordinary users to pay higher fees.

Recent Ethereum upgrades have not helped the problem either. The London upgrade and EIP-1559 did not reduce fees. On the contrary, fees have skyrocketed since the upgrades.

The most noteworthy of these is the jump that began on August 22. From the 22nd to the present, Ethereum's transaction fees have risen by more than 200%. Currently, the average cost of each transaction has risen to more than US$30.

In comparison, the average transaction fee for the entire blockchain network is $10, making the current surge in transaction fees the highest transaction fees in the network's history.

NFT platforms and decentralized exchanges (DEX) have not been left out, with users on these platforms reportedly having to pay higher fees.

Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap charge up to $300 per trade, while users of NFT marketplaces are seeing fees above $1,000 on platforms like OpenSea. This has sparked discussion about the future of blockchains, if fees are too high and most users are unable to trade on them.

Someone might come up with a whole new blockchain network to replace Ethereum as the leading smart contract platform. Ethereum’s high fees have drawn attention across the Crypto market because of its popularity.

As Ethereum falls out of favor due to rising fees, other platforms are preparing to fill the gap it may leave, and one of these blockchain competitors is Cardano, which has been popular recently. According to the plan, Cardano's smart contract function will be released on September 12, and the network has lower fees than Ethereum.

Of course, other competitors include Polkadot, Solana, Terra, Tron, Avalanche, EOS and other public chains that we are also familiar with. They are all preparing to launch an impact on the Ethereum ecosystem.

In addition, there are the most prominent exchange public chains, such as Binance's smart chain, which can be said to be the blockchain where the world's largest Crypto exchange is located.

These blockchains mentioned above have the same capabilities as the Ethereum blockchain, but their transaction fees appear to be lower compared to the leading blockchain network.

On the other hand, the Ethereum team is not unaware of these things happening. After all, the migration to ETH2.0 has been going on for many years.

According to current plans, Ethereum 2.0 is expected to be fully launched in 2022. This upgrade will fundamentally solve the network's fee problem, as well as other issues related to the network's scalability, security and efficiency.

The original text comes from bitcoinist and is compiled by Blockchain Knight. The English copyright belongs to the original author. Please contact the translator for Chinese reprint.