Fees for processing transactions on the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks fell to a half-year low amid declining market activity.
According to BitInfoCharts, on April 21, the average commission on the Bitcoin network climbed to an all-time high of $ 62.78. Now it is only $ 7.27, down almost 90% in six weeks. Bitcoin fees tripled in February in two weeks after Tesla announced the purchase of the cryptocurrency.
The cost of bitcoin transactions was directly affected by the decline in its rate. It now costs 43% less to process a transaction in dollars than at the highs in mid-April, at the same cost in bitcoin. With the fall in the cryptocurrency rate, the activity of traders also decreased. According to CoinGecko, bitcoin trading volume in the last 24 hours was about $ 30 billion, after having been declining all last week.
The impact of the recent mining difficulty adjustment is also felt. On Sunday, it fell by 16% – this is a record for the last year. On Monday, the average block time was 9 minutes 44 seconds, while in the previous segment it rose above 11 minutes. As a result, the mempool is almost completely free of unprocessed transactions.
The average Ethereum transaction processing fee is currently $ 6. On May 12, the figure reached $ 70. The growth in Ethereum fees is associated primarily with the activity in the space of decentralized finance, as well as with the increased attention of traders to Shiba Inu (SHIB) and similar tokens. In May, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin crashed the SHIB market, thereby cooling the speculative fever.
Thanks to the reduction in fees, Ethereum users finally got the opportunity to conduct transactions that they could postpone for a long time due to the prohibitive cost. So, according to GasNow, the exchange of an asset on the Uniswap v2 exchange with the fastest execution speed will now cost $ 5.60. More recently, traders paid $ 200-300 for the same operations.
Uniswap remains the largest consumer of gas in the cryptocurrency world with a daily consumption of $ 2.8 million in the aggregate of the second and third versions. This, however, is already significantly less than the $ 5.8 million average over the past seven days.

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