Against the background of the renewal of the high above $ 48,000, the average transaction fee on the Bitcoin network peaked in three years and exceeded $ 25. Ethereum transaction fees also rose to $ 24.
The continued rise in prices of major cryptocurrencies, fueled by the news of Tesla’s $ 1.5 billion purchase of BTC, has led to a rapid rise in transaction fees on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.
According to BitInfoCharts, the average BTC transaction fee reached a three-year high on February 10 at $ 25.46, and dropped to $ 22.59 over the past 24 hours. After the news of the purchase of bitcoins by Elon Musk’s company, the average transaction fee increased by 122% in just three days – on Sunday, the payment to miners for confirmation was about $ 11.45.
Bitcoin price surpassed another all-time high of $ 48,000 per coin this week. However, despite the high fees, Bitcoin transaction fees are now lower than during the late 2017 bull rally. Then the average commission for a transaction reached $ 55.
According to experts, most users adhere to the HODL strategy – they buy cryptocurrency without intending to sell it in the near future. Bitcoin developer Leon Johnson said that the average BTC investor has nothing to worry about.
“Most investors are implementing the HODL strategy. Therefore, I don’t consider high commissions a big problem yet, ”he said.
He added that the solution could be the Lightning Network – a second-tier network that accelerates transactions by conducting them outside of Bitcoin. But most people can’t use Lightning, as it is still not available for the most popular wallets.
Usually, the increase in commissions is due to the increase in user activity, who want their transaction to be processed as quickly as possible. During such periods, more users are willing to pay high fees to miners to prioritize their transactions.
A similar problem is observed in Ethereum. According to Blockchair data, on February 10, the average transaction value on Ethereum reached $ 22.59, and on February 9, it exceeded a record high of $ 24. Currently, the average cost of sending a transaction is about $ 14.5.
ConsenSys developer Jordan Lyall said that, as with Bitcoin, the demand for transactions on the Ethereum network is very high. This is due to the growing popularity of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms, which in most cases run on Ethereum.
The next increase in fees in the Ethereum network could accelerate the implementation of EIP 1559. The proposed structure of fees in EIP 1559 adapts autonomously to the requirements of the network and allows users to pay only the fees that are actually necessary for the transaction. As a reminder, last month, eight mining pools that control about 30% of Ethereum’s hashing power teamed up against EIP 1559, which offers burning ETH when paying fees.
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