Ethereum transactions get expensive as BTC fees overtaken

The cryptocurrency market has been stuck in a rut lately, with the prices of most crypto-assets in the market moving sideways. This has been the case with the world’s largest and the second-largest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, both cryptos that have been moving crab-like with no change in their price trends. Despite such restricted movement, however, Ethereum’s fees have taken a lead over Bitcoin’s.

Source: CoinMetrics

This increase in fees was around the same time as when Bitcoin’s value noted a sudden drop to $9k, a time when some of the fall’s effects were also noted in the ETH market. The last time Ethereum’s fees were higher than BTC’s was in 2018. This continued for 14 days before Bitcoin got back to its position, added the report by CoinMetrics.

The Ethereum network has been seeing adoption via various applications running on top of it. For instance, as Tether moved to the Ethereum standard, there were rising complaints of network congestion and delayed transactions. In order to moderate the problem, ETH miners announced an increase in gas prices. The increased use of the ETH network contributed to the blocks getting full over the past few weeks, resulting in a dramatic increase in gas price.

Source: CoinMetrics

The standing of Ethereum, however, appeared to be taking over Bitcoin’s as users entrusted their investments in Ether. The total number of addresses holding ETH was at 39.96 million, whereas those holding BTC were at 30.1 million, as per data from Intotheblock. Apart from the addresses holding ETH, the announcement of ETH 2.0 has resulted in the number of wallets holding over 32 ETH [minimum threshold for staking] noting a rise as well. The number of unique addresses has also been rising and touched 102.227 million, at the time of writing.

Despite reporting such on-chain growth, Bitcoin’s median fees were still leading. As the change in fees was only recent, the median BTC fees remained higher than that of Ethereum’s. It fluctuated between $1 and $1.50 for BTC, while ETH’s median fee was restricted under $1 and was bouncing between $0.47 and $0.65.