As of Tuesday, average and median transaction fees have skyrocketed to record highs of $10.33 and $5.68, respectively.Average fees reached record highs of $6.04 on Aug. 13, as while median fees stayed just below their all-time highs of $3.03.
Steep network fees are a “double-edged sword” for Ethereum, said Wilson Withiam, Ethereum analyst at Messari, in a private message with steemleo.They can ward off potential users he noted. But rising fees also signify an increase in network utilization and demand for block space.As fees increase, entities responsible for large on-chain transaction volume are searching for techniques to reduce pressure on the network.
The idea behind zk-rollups is aggregating multiple operations transfers, smart contract calls into one single L1 transaction that ‘compress’ all the underlying transactions,” Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino said in an email to steemleo.Zk-rollups are at the moment the most comprehensive L2 solution for the Ethereum scalability problem.”
- As transaction fees continue to increase, largely caused by the continued explosion of decentralized finance (DeFi), this is causing DeFi to “slowly become a game reserved for the wealthy,” Withiam said.