While ETH 2.0 does not arrive, investors suffer from GAS on ETH

As the price of Ethereum (ETH) starts to slowly recover after a difficult week for the entire cryptocurrency market, indicators of its more positive future moves are appearing.

In this regard, some experts have been pointing out that the coming months should be bullish for Ether, after GAS rates soared on April 30 when Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), launched its “Otherside” metaverse on Ethereum.

As a result of the launch, ETH’s gas rates have soared to over 800 GWEI. This is the highest rate in the network’s history, according to data published by analytics platform CoinMetrics.

In addition, the race to mint NFTs caused over 10,000 failed transactions. This cost affected users over $4 million in GAS fees.

High Gas Rates on Ethereum

The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap has long been criticized for its high transaction fees.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin himself acknowledged that high fees remain a significant challenge, undermining its usability in creating a decentralized economy, especially in use cases beyond the recently dominant financial applications.

Buterin has already stated, for example, that the cost of sending ETH and exchanging tokens has to be less than $0.05 to be “truly acceptable”.

Rates are expected to decline following the next update, The Merge, due to launch in the second half of 2022, marking the network’s official transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake. (PoS)

While BAYC highlighted ETH’s failures, one positive aspect is that a historic amount of ETH that was burned during the event helped to reduce the overall ETH supply.

More than 66,000 ETH were burned between 9pm and midnight. To put this into context, around 13,500 new ETH are issued per day.