Ethereum miners are making a killing from transaction fees. In August alone, the miners raked in a total of $113 million in profit, up more than 3,660% from the $3 million earned in April, according to the latest data from Glassnode.
This is the highest ether miners have earned from transaction fees ever. The previous all-time high of $64 million was reported in January 2018, said the crypto analytics firm.
Fees have risen so high that on September 1, ETH miners made a record profit of over $500,000 in just one hour. At the time of writing, it cost about $6.57, on average, to send a transaction over the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. That compares with fees of just $0.09 in April.
Analysts blame the soaring transaction costs on the continuing hype within the decentralized finance (Defi) space, which has grown into a $9 billion industry within a matter of weeks.
According to Etherscan, defi protocols such as Uniswap, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, is one of a few with the highest network utilization. Tether (USDT), Sushi Swap, and Yearn Finance (YFI) are the others.
As the ethereum community continues to show concern over steep fees, developers have been testing technical solutions to reduce costs and improve efficiency, including a network upgrade dubbed Ethereum 2.0. But the project is still several months away from coming to fruition.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says investors will have to utilize layer two technology to get around the issue of high transaction fees. He tweeted on Tuesday:
To those replying with ‘gas fees are too high’, my answer to that is ‘well then more people should
