The recent ramp higher in cryptocurrency prices has assuredly attracted its fair share of cheerleaders and detractors alike, but the reality of this climb has been a concurrent increase in network fees from rising transaction volumes.
Binance is Blamed for Purposely Choking Ethereum’s Network to Drive More Users to Its Own Platform
The resulting volumes have clogged networks like Ethereum, which have seen gas costs climb almost 20x over the last 12 months. For the growing DeFi market, these sky-high costs have elicited significant criticism from the community and mobilized the ecosystem to hunt for more affordable options. Enter Binance, which may dethrone Ethereum as the new DeFi hotspot due to its interoperability and lower transaction costs.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC), which works on a Proof of Authority (POA) model, is centralized (Binance picks the authorities that run each node) relative to Ethereum’s entirely decentralized approach. This has prompted some users to criticize the approach, believing that Binance is abusing its clout and market power to intentionally clog the Ethereum network. However, this sharp critique misses the bigger picture.
A quick look at wallet and gas data highlights that Binance is the largest single gas spender. For instance, the image above tweeted by Nansen AI highlights from February 12th to the 18th, Binance spent the equivalent of nearly 5,000 ETH in gas alone. Although many users are quick to criticize publicized data of Asian exchanges which are known for inflating trading volume, this data can be corroborated by Etherscan data.
The data demonstrate that both in terms of gas spent and transaction volume over the last seven days, wallets attributed to Binance accounted for six out of 10 of the most active wallets
