Ethereum Fees Top Bitcoin
It seems that the flippening… a flippening, rather, has just taken place. According to many on Twitter, the transaction fees on Ethereum (ETH) have eclipsed that of Bitcoin for the first time in a while.
Prominent Bitcoin proponent Grubles noted that yesterday afternoon, the average standard transfer for ETH cost some $0.045 to $0.064. At the same time, the recommended next hour confirmation fee was $0.03. Wow.
Bitcoin is cheaper than Ethereum. https://t.co/9lcj6DmFb8 pic.twitter.com/vNnlohUCd2
— grublés (@notgrubles) September 21, 2019
Cryptocurrency analytics provider Glassnode corroborated this. It noted in a tweet that Ethereum’s total fees paid metric is up more than 230% since the start of September. It added that yesterday, Ethereum transactors paid more than Bitcoin transactors for the first time in six months.
What’s crazy is that this trend looks poised to continue, at long as demand for Bitcoin transactions remains relatively low.
#Ethereum fees still on the rise.
After an increase of more than 230% since the beginning of the month, yesterday's Ethereum daily fees were higher than #Bitcoin's for the first time in 6 months.
Live chart: https://t.co/pFndy97u9r pic.twitter.com/HFRWF052Kx
— glassnode (@glassnode) September 22, 2019
Many see this as a clear sign that Ethereum’s fundamentals strength is improving. This is especially timely, as save for the recent rally, Bitcoin has been absolutely running laps around ETH.
Why So?
So, why is this taking place?
Well, this has much to do with Ethereum-based tokens and applications gaining traction.
Tether has migrated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of USDT onto Ethereum from the Bitcoin-based Omni Network, leading to a massive increase in demand for ERC-20 tokens on the blockchain because exchanges have decided to embrace the ERC-20 USDT instead of the OMNI iteration.
Also, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications have continued to see an increasing number of users, as consumers begin to see the value in gaining returns on their holdings and trading in a decentralized manner.
While Ethereum-based applications surely seem to be gaining traction, there have been some concerns of spam smart contracts. Toronto-based Ethereum contributor Eva Beylin, who is working on The Graph Protocol, MolochDAO, among other projects building with blockchain, recently “went down the rabbit hole” of a spam Ethereum application that is clogging the blockchain.
Beylin wrote in an extensive thread that an application called “FairWin” is a gas-guzzling Ponzi scheme that has spent $800,000 in fees, often being responsible for upwards of 50% of all Ethereum transactions on the chain. She postulated that this may be a scheme by ETH whales to pump the value of the cryptocurrency through high network metrics.
Just went down the rabbit hole of "FairWin" that's clogging up our precious Ethereum.
tl;dr – Fairwin is the most gas guzzling dapp & spent ~$800K in fees in the last month but the project is dead & never had a product?
What's going on?! This isn't fair! Thread.
— Eva Beylin (@evabeylin) September 20, 2019
Title Image Courtesy of Marco Verch Via Flickr