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Last year the explosion of DeFi on the Ethereum Network lead to an explosion in the price of gas. Simple transactions that a year earlier could be done for less then a dollar were easily now running people $20-$30 during the day and often way more. With Ethreum 2.0 having been announced and the move towards the Proof of Stake Network I was very interested in the London Hard Fork or EIP-1559 as it is also known.
One of if not the biggest changes in this fork was the change in how gas fees were calculated. Previously if you were like me you went to Etherscan and tried to choose a premium that was more than normal but not to high that you wasted money. This system was by no means perfect and the fact you had to guess a number really shows the issue in itself. EIP-1559 brought about the idea of establishing a base price and then having people be willing to tip the miner.
It eliminated the wild west nature of it and has from what I have seen made the transaction cost much less volatile. One thing I wondered though was did it at least for me really help the price I was paying per transaction? The idea of stabilizing it does lead you to believe that the average cost at least would be lower in my opinion but do the numbers match?
To me and with what I have had to pay it has been a resounding no. The gas fees have exploded in my eyes and I am not looking at the dollar amount rather I am looking at the ETH price. Maybe it is due to my hours and how I learned to run my transactions before work and right before I went to bed but over this last summer, I was never spending more than $5 on the chain and often only spent 0.001 to 0.002 on a transaction. Now though that has all changed.
A transaction no matter when I try it whether it be at 3 AM, 8 AM, Noon or any other time is running me close to 0.005 to 0.01 ETH! That is a huge increase and to compound it the price of Ethereum is at all-time highs! When it was $2,800 I thought these fees were stupid high but with the price, at $3,700 I have almost had a heart attack a few times. One time METAMASK suggested I pay almost 3 WHOLE ETH it was saying my best bet was to pay over $10,000 in gas fees for a transaction that was a couple hundred dollars! This is pretty crazy to see to say the least. Now sometimes I do run across transactions that only ended up costing me a dollar or two but with how hyped up this upgrade was I have to say I am pretty disappointed.
It seems to me that while the baseline did stabilize the price it increased the price 5 to 10 times what I was paying in July which is a tough pill to swallow when you are thinking you will be getting a decrease. People I have talked to though who traded during busy hours though love it as their cost has fallen substantially. It really seems to depend on when you would try to do your transactions to see how the upgrade affected you. I will be really interested to see how the PoS pricing works and hope that it really follows through in lowering the cost because these gas fees get pretty silly sometimes!
I am interested to hear about how everyone else has faired so far with the gas prices!?! For me, it's safe to say it has been a little rough!
