Fees tied to the Ethereum network have been under the $5 region per transaction during the last 175 days, according to statistics. Metrics show that on Dec. 10, 2022, the average ethereum transfer is around 0.0023 ether or $2.87 while the median-sized gas fee is around 0.00097 ether or $1.23 per transfer. Ethereum gas metrics recorded on etherscan.io indicate high transfer fees are even lower than the median and average-sized gas payments.
Ethereum fees remain significantly lower than last year following the merger
According to Bitinfocharts.com, on November 9, 2021, the average transaction fee on the Ethereum network was approximately $62.84 nominal per transaction. Today, the average gas cost required to send Ether is estimated to be around $2.87, which is 95.43% cheaper than a year ago in November 2021.
The Ethereum network uses gas or a fee to prevent spam on the network and every transaction onchain requires a certain amount of gas to push the transfer. Ethereum fees have been a lot better since The Merge and more specifically since June 18, 2022.
Since then, the average Ether fee has been in the under $5 range for approximately 175 days with a brief spike above $5 per transaction on November 8, 2022. On the same day the crypto markets experienced extreme price volatility due to the FTX collapse.
Besides that day, for most of the 175-day period, average ether fees have been under the $3 range in value. The same can be said for Ethereum’s median-sized gas fees which remained under $2 per transfer throughout most of the time frame.
Current data from etherscan.io’s gas tracker shows that high-priority fees are well below bitinfocharts.com’s average and average-sized fee values. At the time of writing on Saturday, December 10, 2022, etherscan.io’s gas tracker estimates the high priority Ethereum gas fee to be around 21 gwei or $0.48 per transfer.
However, that cited value is to simply send the crypto asset ethereum (ETH), as it costs more gas to interact with a smart contract that either sends an ERC20 token or performs an onchain swap. For example, the onchain fee for an Opensea non-fungible token (NFT) listing is estimated to cost $1.74 per transaction.
Sending an ERC20 token like USDT or USDC is estimated to cost $1.31 per transfer, and exchanging ERC20 coins on Saturday could cost users a gas fee of around $4.48. While onchain fees have been low on Ethereum over the past 175 days, layer two (L2) fees have been even lower.
Arbitrum fees to send ether are around $0.03 per transfer and an Optimism L2 transfer is estimated to be around $0.10 per transaction. Similarly, Zksync, Loopring, Polygon Hermez, Boba, and Aztec L2 transactions are also much lower in value than traditional onchain Ethereum network transfers.
