The London HardFork Failed to Reduce GAS fees, but what does this mean for ETH in the medium term?

If you've been been transacting on Ethereum recently you've probably noticed that the GAS fees are higher now compared to back in July before the London Hardfork....

You can track all of this on Etherscan.io where you'll find a host of charts, such as the trend in the average ETH GAS fee...

And the increase in fees isn't because of increased usage pushing up average TX fees either - If we go by average block size then Ethereum has got busier, but the increase isn't large enough to explain the increase in GAS prices.

In fairness to the London Hardfork, I don't think its main purpose was to reduce fees, it was rather to level them out across the time of day and day of week, making them more predictable - and the Burning of ETH fees facilitated this.

NB - as something of an aside one thing the Hardfork has done is to shaft anyone who was previously prepared to trade at 4.00 a.m. on Sunday mornings or other previously light-usage times on ETH - as this guy points out now he and EVERYONE else is paying high gas fees.

Burning ETH

The ETH network is currently generating around $15K a day

And those are burned....

I think it's highly unlikely that burning ETH is going to reduce GAS fees.... the less ETH there is, the higher price, all other things being equal, and maybe this reduction in the ETH supply is what is fuelling a sustained increase in the TX price?

To my mind the crucial factor is this - how much are users willing to pay in fees in order to transact on ETH?

So where are people's fee spending limits?

ATM $20 dollar fees to send, $70 fees to swap, and $200 fees to set up a new OpenSea account don't seem to be putting people off:

TX Street tells us that each block is up to 85% of its gas limit, so demand is pretty healthy, even at these prices

And If we look at the longer term chart, there was a sustained period in Spring 2021 when users were prepared to pay around 3 times as much as they are currently, on average, and that then a brief period in early summer when average transaction fees just went silly.....

I guess this all depends on how many BIG players are transacting

If you're dealing in amounts of >$10K then I guess even a $100 fee isn't going to be too off-putting, as that's only 1% of your TX costs.

However, for the smaller user, ETH is already a no-go area, except maybe as a place to stash and hold a couple of thousand dollars worth of crypto in one go, and then leave it until you want to cash the WHOLE LOT out, as the fees make it prohibitive to worth with smaller amounts.

And now we have so many alternatives

Binance Smart Chain should need no introduction as an alternative, but maybe Polygon is going to be the real sting in Eth's tail - as a second layer solution, you can mint NFTs on ETH, on OpenSea for example, and then transfer them over to Polygon where you can transfer them for a tiny fraction of the ETH fees, paid in Matic.

And the same is true of DEFI - maybe the future is one in which people pay a one off fee to transfer from ETH to Polygon, interact on Polygon, and then the only other time they use ETH is to get their money out again.

And/ or they start using other chains altogether - BSC obviously, but Atom has a working DEFI alternative, and ADA is set to launch soon as well, all with fees measured in a few cents, not $!0-$200!

Final Thoughts...

Eth is not fit for mass adoption, that is an absolute certainty - it is just not viable to the smaller crypto user when it's only viable to TX in amounts over $1000.

So maybe late 2021 to 2022 - that's what we'll see - probably what we're already seeing. people minting on ETH but otherwise using ETH sparingly, and doing everything else of other chains.

I'm sure this recent price pump is just because of the recent burn pushing the price up and the fact that we're adjusting to it - I simply cannot see people choosing to carry on paying these current fees, not when there are so many viable alternatives.

Having said that, I can't see the ETH price going down either, there's demand at current prices which should at least stabilise the price, but I'm not expecting it to carry on increasing to 2, 3 or 4 more times - the increasing fees will eventually just leas to people using it less and less.

The increase in the BNB price and other alternatives suggest that's the way things are going to go too.

Maybe until ETH 2.0, but I think that's a story for 2023 or later?

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta