07 Mar 2022
Ethereum transaction fees at a six-month low
After staying at elevated levels during the second half of 2021, Ethereum transaction fees started plummeting in January and are now at the lowest levels since August 2021.
The chart shows the mean fee paid for a simple wallet-to-wallet Ethereum transaction.The gas price determines Ethereum transaction fees. Each operation on Ethereum demands a certain amount of gas, which is the computational resource of the network.Simply speaking, the more complicated a computational operation is, the more gas it requires. A wallet-to-wallet transaction is one of the simplest Ethereum operations, while examples of heavy computational tasks are token swaps and NFT minting.The gas price is determined by supply and demand. Therefore, periods of high token swapping and NFT minting activity on Ethereum are correlated with spikes in transaction fees.The NFT mania roared in the second half of 2021, pushing the gas price to sky-high levels. The mean transaction fee was above $50 on many days, while the cost of making more complicated token swaps was well over $200.Comparatively, the estimated price of a token swap on Ethereum is around $15 now. Therefore, if you have been waiting for lower fees before swapping tokens or minting NFTs, now might be a good time.