EIP-1559, which has destroyed nearly 4,000 ETH, has caused network fees to soar? Here are five reasons

At 8:30 pm on August 5, the Ethereum mainnet reached the designated block height of 12,965,000. With the official launch of the London hard fork upgrade, five EIPs were activated, including: EIP-1559, EIP-3198, EIP-3529, EIP-3541 and EIP-3554.

In particular, EIP-1559 is the focus of attention. The proposal introduces a base fee, which will not be distributed to miners but will be directly destroyed.

As of 1:30 pm on August 6, according to Ultrsound.money data, EIP-1559 has driven the destruction of 3,841.57 ETH in the past 17 hours. Although Ethereum has not yet entered a deflationary state, this has led to a significant reduction in new issuance.

Soon after the implementation of EIP-1559, the cost of Ethereum network fees rose sharply in a short period of time. According to Gas Now data, at around 1 a.m. on August 6, the Gas price reached a peak of 264 gwei under the "fast" standard.

Why did the gas price suddenly surge? Why are user tips higher than 2 gwei?

Ethereum Foundation ecosystem staff trent.eth responded on Twitter:

• Why is the base fee so high?

1. There are some massive NFT airdrops going on, causing network congestion.

2. Many services, such as exchanges, disabled some functionality during the network upgrade. Once these platforms are satisfied with the stability of the upgraded blockchain, this pent-up demand will be released.

3. Some miners set the gas limit below 30 million, which only allows them to use about 13.5 million gas. In comparison, the gas limit before the upgrade was 15 million → less available block space → lower throughput.

4. Users are trying out the new EIP 1559 feature: sending a large transaction, sending their first destroy transaction.

• Why is priorityFee higher than 2 gwei?

5. Wallet APIs are still being rolled out. Most people haven’t even sent new transaction types → Can’t adjust priorityFee. Note: Tips are additional fees that users can pay to miners so that their transactions can be confirmed faster.

It will take time for these APIs to adjust their algorithms to provide the recommended priorityFee - many wallets are still observing the mechanism and making adjustments.