Transaction fees on the Ethereum blockchain (ETH) are currently at their lowest level since last December, but for all that, users are far from abandoning the blockchain, particularly from the point of view of ETH staking. At the same time, activity on layer 2 is on the rise, although affected by the recent drop in Base following the collapse of friend.tech.
Transaction fees at record low on Ethereum
Sales open on Ethereum: the average fees paid daily by users of the world’s largest blockchain are at their lowest since last December.
As a reminder, fees are paid by any Ethereum user wishing to carry out a transaction on the network. Fees are calculated in gwei, based on activity on the blockchain. To find out more about Ethereum transaction fees, please read our dedicated page
Fees per transaction for Ethereum (purple)
Naturally, total fees collected are also at their lowest level over the same period. After peaking at ETH 16,720 in May, only ETH 1,720 was collected from blockchain transactions on 27 August, a drop of 89%.
Total daily fees on Ethereum
However, the number of new addresses created remains stable, with more than 2 million Ethereum addresses added each month on average. At the same time, as we reported this morning, Ether staking is steadily increasing. In fact, more than 20% of ETH currently in circulation is used to secure the blockchain.
On the other hand, layer 2s developed on Ethereum are also on the rise, as they are becoming the solution of choice for getting round the high transaction costs associated with Ethereum, among other things.
In fact, on 21 August, the number of transactions per second (TPS) on all Ethereum layer 2s reached a record high of 54.05 TPS, compared with 1.7 TPS for Ethereum.
This momentum coincides with the very high activity observed on Base, the layer 2 developed by Coinbase, following the appearance of the Web3 social application friend.tech, for which the craze has since collapsed.
TPS on Ethereum (blue) and all its layer 2s (red)
These layer 2s, with Arbitrum (ARB) at the forefront, followed by Optimism (OP) and zkSync Era, are experiencing considerable momentum which seems to be encouraging adoption around Ethereum, which should also benefit greatly from the Cancun update, which is supposed to greatly reduce the transaction costs of the various second-layer networks.
