The Ethereum blockchain has seen a notable resurgence in activity since its latest Fusaka upgrade, to the point of setting a new record for daily transactions while its fees are at an all-time low. At the same time, the validator queue has finally fallen below the 24-hour mark.
New record activity on Ethereum
Clearly, there is a before and after following Ethereum’s latest major update last December, codenamed Fusaka. And for good reason, as this hard fork included major changes, such as an increase in the gas limit of its blocks and optimized management of “blobs” using dedicated BPOs.
Since its official deployment, activity on its blockchain has continued to increase, reaching a new all-time high earlier this week with 2.88 million transactions processed in a single day, according to data from the Etherscan website, an increase of more than 70% compared to its records set during the 2021 bull market.
One of the obvious reasons for this significant increase in activity on the Ethereum blockchain is undoubtedly the relatively low level of its gas fees, with transactions costing an average of 0.04 gwei, or less than $0.01. As a result, a typical swap currently costs only 5 cents.
This fluidity is also—finally—reflected in the management of its validators, after weeks of insane queues that still exceeded a month’s wait just a week ago. Indeed, this delay has finally fallen below 24 hours, even if the wait to enter remains set at more than 47 days.
An “ultra sound money” that still has to prove itself
Despite these very good results, Ethereum is still struggling to win a crucial battle that began with its transition to Proof of Stake (PoS) – The Merge – in September 2022: to become an “ultra sound money” with a deflationary purpose, based on the Bitcoin model.
In fact, the available supply of ETH has continued to increase steadily since that date, although it seems fair to say that this remains under control. According to data from the Ultra Sound Money website, this increase represents a total of 866,696 additional ETH (currently $2.6 billion), despite a burn of more than 2 million units over this period.
It therefore seems that the use of the Ethereum blockchain is not yet sufficient to generate enough fees to result in a total burn that would make ETH deflationary.
Perhaps the current increase in activity will help reverse the trend?
