Ethereum supporters cheered the increase in daily revenue, while many others pointed to network congestion and usage difficulties.
Amid the growing memecoin craze, Ethereum network gas fees have surged to multi-month highs. High transaction fees have inflated Ethereum’s daily revenue several times compared to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin While Ethereum supporters cheered the revenue growth, many others were quick to point to the network’s growing congestion and difficulty processing transactions.
The top 10 gas-burning altcoins have an unusual twist, not ETH
Ethereum, WETH, and USDT
$1.00, memecoins like TROLL, APED, and BOBO are in the top 10.
As of April 20, the average gas price for Ethereum transactions was 81.94 gwei, up from 60.82 gwei on April 19 and 44.42 gwei last year — an increase of 34.74% and 84.46% from April 19 and April 20, 2022, respectively. Gwei is a denomination of Ether that represents one billionth of an ETH.
ETH gas fees have increased over the last month. Source: Ychart
Independent Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano shared the surge in daily fee revenue on the Ethereum network, saying that the second-largest blockchain brings in 28 times more revenue than Bitcoin. He also cited Ethereum layer 2 platforms like Arbitrum One, which are outperforming the BTC network in terms of daily revenue due to the ongoing meme craze.
Daily and weekly revenues for various blockchains. Source: Twitter
The main argument of Ethereum supporters is that high gas fees and the resulting higher revenues highlight the growing usability of the network. However, many on Crypto Twitter were quick to point out that the widespread use they were referring to was just a few thousand users gambling on memecoins.
Some users reportedly paid up to hundreds of dollars in gas fees, while others complained about having to pay higher gas fees than were actually charged for the transactions.
Another major reason for the gas fee surge is blamed on the Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) trading bot, which is front-running memecoin transactions on a massive scale. The bot in question, jaredfromsubway.eth, has been the top gas spender over the past 24 hours, spending 455 ETH ($950,000) and using 7% of the network’s total gas.
In the past two months, it has spent more than 3,720 ETH ($7 million) in gas fees and executed more than 180,000 transactions.
A Subway-themed bot is using sandwich-trading technology to make millions of dollars while clogging up the web.
