Despite growing blockchain activity on Ethereum, gas fees on the world’s largest smart contract network remain near historic lows, signaling a more mature and scalable infrastructure ready for advanced real-world use cases.
Ethereum transaction fees remained at a historic low of just 0.16 gwei, or about $0.01 per transaction. Gas fees were slightly higher for token swaps at $0.15 and at $0.27 for non-fungible token (NFT) sales, according to blockchain data aggregator Milkroad.
The low costs stand in sharp contrast to previous periods of high network activity, when demand often sent fees soaring, which was one of Ethereum’s biggest criticisms in past cycles.
Ethereum gas fees, 1-month chart. Source: milkroad.com/ethereum
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Ethereum activity rises amid stable fees
Daily transactions on the network rose to 1.6 million on Tuesday, marking a near one-month high, last seen at the beginning of October before the record $19 billion liquidation event.
Ethereum total transactions, 1-year chart. Source: app.Nansen.ai
Active addresses also rose to similar values, peaking at a monthly high of 695,872 on Saturday, according to crypto intelligence platform Nansen.
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Ethereum’s historically low gas fees follow the Dencun and Pectra upgrades, both designed to lower transaction costs and expand throughput.
Deployed in May, the Pectra upgrade has doubled the blob capacity of layer-2 (L2) networks, cutting the transaction fees on L2s by around 50%. This upgrade also served to offload more transactions from the mainnet to further cut costs.
Ethereum’s previous major upgrade, Dencun, has also managed to cut L2 transaction fees and offload more transactions from the L1, making average Ethereum transaction fees cheaper by 95% a year after it was deployed on March 13, 2024, Cointelegraph reported.
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