In the last few days it has occurred a sharp drop in Ethereum gas.
The drop in gas on Ethereum
To tell the truth, however, the anomaly is not so much in this decline, but in the previous peak.
Until October 23rd the average transaction fees were less than $ 25, with the median less than $ 11. Beginning on October 24, they began to surge, reaching a fourth-quarter high on November 2, with average fees jumped to over $ 56, and the medians to over $ 30.
Starting from November 3, the situation has somewhat normalized, so much so that yesterday the average fees fell to $ 36, while the median fees to $ 18.
Expressed in Gwei, the average fees per transaction have passed from 71 Gwei on 23 October to 198 Gwei on 28 October. Starting from 3 November they started to go down, until yesterday returning to 104 Gwei. At this time they have also dropped below 90 Gwei. 1 Gwei corresponds to 0.000000001 ETH.
The reduction in fees also led to a slight reduction of the ETH burned thanks to the update London. The average of the last 30 days is 7.29 ETH burned every minute, while yesterday’s was 6.88.
The congestion of the Ethereum network
Still being a Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain, Ethereum is often congested with a very large number of transactions waiting to be placed in a block and confirmed. The higher the congestion, the more those who send ETH or on-chain ERC-20 tokens have to pay fees to ensure short validation.
Fees are therefore an excellent thermometer to measure the level of network congestion, which in recent weeks had been particularly high, although probably not at an all-time high.
This situation is repeated very often especially when the price of ETH rises a lot and quickly, so it is reasonable to expect other flare-ups of this type in case of new price booms.
The speech, on the other hand, is now slightly different for Bitcoin, given that many low-value transactions no longer pass through the blockchain, but are regulated on the Lightning Network which does not use PoW to validate them.
Therefore above all transactions of large amounts remain recorded on the blockchain, so much so that the fees have been significantly reduced. The fourth quarter high was below $ 5 on October 7.
It should be remembered, however, that while only BTC transactions are recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, on that of Ethereum they are also recorded transactions of thousands of ERC-20 tokens, including USDt and Shiba Inu, just to mention the two that have generated the largest volumes in recent weeks.
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