On October 29, 2021, the second-largest crypto asset in terms of market valuation, ethereum, reached an all-time price high at $4,467 per unit. Meanwhile, after the Altair upgrade of the Ethereum network went live, ether gas tariffs increased significantly.
As Ethereum Tests New Price Highs, the Average Ether Transfer Fees Onchain Skyrocket
The two leading crypto assets by market valuation have had issues with high transfer fees for many years now but this month, Ethereum’s network fees are significantly higher than bitcoin’s. On Saturday, October 30, Bitcoin’s Average Network Fee (BTC) according to data from bitinfocharts.com shows BTC fees to be around 0.00000015 BTC per byte or $ 3.15 per transaction.
The same web portal tracking ethereum (ETH) gas fees notes that to move some ether, it’ll cost around 0.012 ETH or $50.53 per transaction. Data shows that on Saturday morning ETH fees are 1,504% higher than BTC network fees. Data stemming from the website l2fees.info are a bit more modest in comparison to bitinfocharts.com’s metrics. At the time of writing, to move ethereum it’ll cost $18.45 per transaction.
The cost of transferring Ethereum-based tokens and exchange tokens through smart contract is much higher. The transfer of token fee according to l2fees.info on Saturday is $43.13 per transaction and over $94 to swap tokens by interacting with a smart contract. The lowest ether transaction fee of $ 18.45 is still 485% higher than the average BTC transfer today.
Second-Layer Ether Transaction Costs and Swap Token Fee Estimates
Moving ethereum with a second-layer mechanism like Arbitrum or Polygon Hermez is much cheaper to use than onchain ETH transfers on the main network. At the time of going to press, Polygon Hermez-based ether transactions cost around $ 0.25 per transfer, while Loopring’s Zkrollup L2 solution cost $ 0.74. Zksync will cost a user $ 1.03 per upload, and using Arbitrum One costs around $ 4.21. The EVM-compatible Optimistic Rollup chain Optimism’s fees today are $4.31 per transaction.
Using Loopring to trade tokens on Saturdays is also cheaper than the average cost of $ 94 using Ethereum’s mainnet. Loopring’s swap tokens cost is $1.07, Optimism’s fee to swap tokens is $5.54, and Arbitrum fees to swap tokens can cost $7.29 according to today’s metrics hosted on l2fees.info. As ETH has hit an all-time high, onchain fees are higher than usual after the upgrade from Altair, which prepares Ethereum for the next Proof of Stake (PoS) transition.
