Transaction fees are a live readout of a blockchain's economic health — but almost nobody reads them that way.

When a network's fee revenue comes mostly from base fees (protocol-set, burned or redistributed), that reflects genuine demand for blockspace. When fee revenue is dominated by tips and priority fees, it reveals congestion — users bidding against each other to get included. These are very different signals wearing the same label.

$ETH post-EIP-1559 splits this cleanly: the base fee is burned (deflationary when demand is high), while priority tips go to validators. Low base fee = spare capacity. High base fee = the chain is genuinely busy. Watch the ratio, not just the total.

$SOL operates differently — fees are extremely low by design, with validators earning mainly through MEV and staking yield. The signal there is transaction volume and program compute units, not fee price.

$BNB runs a hybrid: BEP-95 burns a portion of gas fees in real time. High burn rates = high network activity = direct supply pressure. The burn figure is a compressed, honest snapshot of ecosystem throughput.

The question to ask about any L1 is not "how low are the fees?" — it's "what are the fees actually measuring?" Low fees on a congested chain means something very different than low fees on an idle one.

Read the fee structure. It's telling you something.

#Crypto #Layer1 #Blockchain #OnChain #CryptoInsight