Ethereum gas fees surged to insane levels amid NFT and DeFi craze

• Ethereum gas fees were seen at high levels today, so much that Uniswap transactions cost nearly $500. 
• About 9.23 ETH are burned every minute due to the spike in the network fee.

For days now, many Ethereum users have been complaining about the ridiculous gas fees which have rendered the network almost unusable for them. Due to the continuous frenzy in the non-fungible token (NFT) and DeFi market, ETH gas fees were spotted at an insane level today, which would cost nearly $500 to process a transaction on Uniswap.

Users lament over spike in Ethereum gas fees 

As seen at 14:15 UTC today, the transaction fee for ERC-20 token transfers increased to $147.32 at low priority and $148.87 at high priority. It would also cost about $458 for token swaps and $400 to add/remove LP from the Ethereum-based decentralized exchange, Uniswap. 

The ridiculous increase in ETH gas fees is a result of the transaction load on the network, which is probably spurred by the rapid-growing amount of trades and activities on the DeFi and NFT market. Consequently, this is rendering the network unusable for many retail Ethereum users, since it’s not profitable to pay more in fees just to process small transactions.

9.23 ETH burned per minute

Given the spike in ETH gas fees, a significant number of ETH are now being burnt every minute, as proposed in the EIP-1559. Data from Ultrasound Money showed that the ETH burn rate has also increased to 9.23 ETH per minute, resulting in over 13,398 ETH burnt within 24 hours. 

Although EIP-1559 doesn’t make Ethereum deflationary, it does help to reduce the coins inflation rate. Meanwhile, ETH has been on the uptrend despite the increase in gas fees. Ether was trading at $3,939 on CoinMarketCap, which represents about a 4.23 percent increase over the last 24 hours.