It’s so exciting! Ethereum’s daily transaction fees exceed Bitcoin for the first time

According to Trustnodes on September 19, the total daily transaction fees of the Ethereum network surpassed Bitcoin for the first time in history.

(Image source: pixabay)

According to Massari data, users paid a total of $207,000 in fees to the Ethereum network in a 24-hour period over the past two days, while Bitcoin paid $180,000.

Currently, Ethereum transaction fees are $0.16 per transaction and Bitcoin transaction fees are $0.20.

Ethereum’s total transaction fees surpass Bitcoin’s, September 2019

As shown in the above chart, the transaction fees of other cryptocurrencies in the past 24 hours are quite different from those of Ethereum and Bitcoin. Litecoin's transaction fees are ranked third at around $1,000, while Bitcoin Cash's transaction fees total only $150.

Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are still in the minority, while Ethereum and Bitcoin are already running at full capacity, with blocks of around 1MB every 10 minutes.

Currently, Ethereum is attempting to increase its block space by 25% through a simple, workable miner vote.

Ethermine, one of the world’s largest mining pools, said their goal is to keep Ethereum’s gas usage below 10 million, but as the chart above shows, the company’s current gas usage is 8.7 million.

This may be due to voting issues at some mining pools, such as F2Pool, as a spokesperson for Ethermine publicly stated:

They are likely using Parity’s default settings, which limit the amount of gas to 8 million by default. In order to avoid saturation of the block capacity, Parity will let users vote to gradually set the gas limit to 10 million.

Ethermine said that before announcing the increase in the gas limit due to public pressure, they simply used the client's gas default value and therefore did not take the time to make changes.

This means that other smaller mining pools may also just be using the default gas limit (because they most likely don’t know how to change it, or they may have customized their node clients).

Therefore, developers may just need to release an updated client that sets the default gas limit value, and since the majority of miners are voting, the block size is increasing.

Meanwhile, Ethereum transaction fees are also rising. EthGasStation estimates that a simple transaction on Ethereum costs $0.14, while token-based transactions cost about twice that much, and smart contract interactions cost even more, potentially as much as S$1 or $2.

Part of the reason fees are rising is that some users are using a lot of gas.

Gas usage ranking, September 2019

For example, the largest user of gas is a gambling profit sharing “project” called fairwin.me.

The second one is of course Tether, which has reduced its gas usage from 50% a few days ago to 10% now.

There are many other projects. We can see that even Cryptokitties has attracted some users.

In order to meet the increasing transaction volume, Ethereum’s protocol efficiency is constantly being improved, and the upcoming Istanbul hard fork can also be called a gas upgrade because it includes certain improvements to gas calculations and the required capacity of each gas unit.

Once it’s live, raising the gas limit further could make the network more secure, and all of these updates give some breathing room to the use of sharding, which ethereum has less than a year left to go.