In recent weeks, Ethereum has been the focus of attention for the excessive use of the network, which had led to a temporary increase in fees to execute transactions on the network.
Thanks to the increase in the GAS limit implemented last week by the miners and the collapse of the Ponzi scheme FairWin – a smart contract on ETH reported by many as a scam -, the ETH blockchain finally returns to breathe a sigh of relief after several weeks of network usage at the highest levels.
In the last few hours, the price of fees to be paid to perform a typical transaction has dropped significantly, going from the initial 40 cents of a dollar 10 days ago to the current 0.029 dollars, returning below the fateful threshold of 0.1 dollars.
Even the fees for slower transactions have fallen considerably, reaching now around 0.004 dollars, according to the data offered by the ETH GAS Station calculator.
Moreover, the pending transactions on the mempool have decreased, going from 100 thousand transactions in queue recorded last September 11th to the current 40 thousand, with a continuous downward trend.
Ethereum network fees: Tether and FairWin free the network
In addition to FairWin’s smart contract, which in recent days has managed to use the Ethereum network up to 70% of total capacity, the use of the USDT tokens supported by the ETH blockchain has also suffered a significant decline, considering the peaks in network usage near 30% in mid-September.
According to the data, in fact, it is estimated that to date Tether is responsible for about 10% of the transactions carried out on the Ethereum network, a threshold much lower than the values of the previous weeks, which were more than 20%.
At the same time, the total usage of the Ethereum network has also fallen considerably, dropping below the fateful 90% figure to 84% today.
It was since last August 15th that the network had not dropped momentarily below the 90% usage threshold, with the whole month of August and September seeing ETH close to 95% of the entire capacity for most of the time.
The same applies to the GAS units used, which fully reflect the trend in network usage. After the recent peaks of 60 billion GAS units used, this figure has finally dropped, slowly approaching the threshold of 50 billion, a value that had already been widely exceeded last September 20th.
At the moment, therefore, the ETH network is slowly decongesting. This is certainly an advantage for all users, who will benefit from lower network fees to be paid to move their Ethereum or ERC20 tokens.
In addition, with the advent of the Istanbul fork, a clear network can be helpful, as it allows to greatly limit the damage in case of problems during the upgrade of the ETH protocol.
