Key facts:
- Ethereum's cumulative commissions during the year exceed $ 350 million.
- For 3 months, the average daily transactions on Ethereum has been 1 million
Ethereum miners got a fair slice of the commission pie for confirming transactions, estimated to have accumulated more than $ 350 million so far in 2020. By comparison, Bitcoin miners made $ 155 million in fees up to August, a similar figure to that obtained in 2019 in the same period.
The train of decentralized finance or DeFi, the adoption of Tether (USDT) by various exchanges and the proliferation of Ethereum-based applications has brought unprecedented traffic to this network and equally profits for miners.
When compared to the commissions that the Bitcoin network has paid to its miners during 2020, the profits on Ethereum mining exceed twice that value. In fact, as of September 27, Ethereum miners have accumulated a total of $ 355 million, a figure that began to take shape in mid-June.
In the same period, Bitcoin miners made $ 156 million, even after the scheduled halving split the mining reward in half and the network became congested at various times.
The congestion resulted in increases in Bitcoin fees, which users had to pay. However, this momentary increase was not reflected in the accumulated total, when compared to the previous year.
As of August 13, Ethereum miners began to accumulate more value for fees than Bitcoin miners. During a 6-day rally from September 18-23, the network's commission earnings reached more than 18,000 ETH daily, approximately $ 6.3 million each day.
In contrast, the Bitcoin network generated gains in excess of 100 BTC during the two busiest weeks in May (and practically the entire month of July and August), with peaks of 200 BTC, close to USD 1.9 million each day, according to Glassnode.
For their part, on September 7, Ethereum miners obtained more than 25,000 ETH from transaction fees, a record value of more than $ 8.7 million.
If we take into account the same 9-month period during 2019, Ethereum's commissions only generated $ 34.5 million for its miners, ten times less than this year.
Other ingredients of the increase in Ethereum commissions
These periods of high demand to settle transactions on the Ethereum blockchain coincide with the emergence of new platforms. For example, Compound and Uniswap, which launched governance tokens with which users perform the so-called yield farming to generate returns.
The yiel farming boom alone produced more than 1 million transactions a day at the end of June. According to CoinMetrics, since that date, daily transactions have exceeded that figure, reaching their peak on September 17 with 1.4 million transactions per day.
On average, users have paid more than 250 Gwei per transaction, between USD 2 and USD 4 in recent months. In mid-August, the USD 7.5 commission mark was reached, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
Consequently, some developers began to brainstorm about the possibility of increasing the block size or the gas limit on the network, with the aim of balancing the balance in favor of lower commissions for users.
