Efirium has really gained a reputation as a blockchain with very high commissions in recent years, as previously a normal token exchange on decentralised exchanges there could easily be valued in ETH by tens of dollars.

Because of this, this network continues to become the object of jokes in the industry. The representatives of the not the most popular project Algorand were the last to remind about it, although this argument for Ethics is no longer particularly relevant.

What will happen to Etherium ETH?

Chief analyst of Bitget Research Ryan Lee said that the current opportunity to buy ETH for investors can be considered attractive.

Lee shared his comments on the market situation in an exclusive interview with CoinDesk journalists. Here is his quote.

Whenever ETH has fallen to the bottom of the ETH network, it has often signalled a price low in the medium term. Efirium usually rises appreciably after this mini-cycle. In addition, what is happening now coincides with the upcoming phase of base lending rate cuts in the US.

Traditionally, we remind that the behaviour of an asset in the past does not guarantee a similar outcome in the future. Therefore, it is definitely not worth waiting for ETH growth solely because of statistics.

Cost of gas in the Efirium network today

In general, each transaction in the Etherium network is valued in gas, and the cost of gas is measured in gwei – the smallest particles of one ETH coin. Earlier this week, the price of gas fell to 0.6 gwei. Today, it sits below 1 gwei.

That is, low-priority transactions cost only 1 gwei or less – a rare occurrence in recent years. Transaction values are down more than 95 per cent from the 83.1 gwei level in March, when the network saw a surge in activity.

It should be noted that during periods of congestion due to a surge in user activity, fees on the Etherium network can jump to inadequate levels. For example, such were the gas rates in the first days of May 2022, when Bitcoin and the coin market as a whole continued its decline amid the onset of a bearish trend. Here you can see that a typical Ethos transaction was valued at hundreds of dollars, which makes the current fee levels seem even more surprising.

Commissions on the Etherium network in early May 2022

This trend has likely been driven by a decline in demand for Etherium’s blockchain resources and a choice to use applications on other blockchains, Lee believes. Here’s his rejoinder.

The drop in commissions on the Etherium network to a five-year low can be attributed to the migration of meme tokens and decentralised applications to other faster and cheaper blockchains like Solana and L2 solutions. The latter became especially relevant after the Dencun update, which significantly reduced the fees for transfers to them.


We are talking about the update, which took place on 13 March 2024. Its main task was to reduce commissions in second-tier networks based on Efirium like Arbitrum. This change forced users to interact more actively with L2-chains, while the load on the main Ethics network was noticeably reduced.


Commissions and revenue pump.fun

Solana’s superiority over Efirium can be traced back to the growing popularity of pump.fun, a platform for listing and trading altcoin-based meme tokens.

Since July, Solana-based pump.fun has generated more fees from commissions than the entire Efirium network several times in a 24-hour period. This means that the demand for the capabilities of this platform is proving to be incredible. However, as we have already found out, the chances of making money on such new projects are practically zero, because only a few of them achieve real popularity.

Against this background, the volume of regularly burned ETH supply is also decreasing due to the drop in activity. Only for the last week, almost 16 thousand ETH equivalent to $42 million at the current altcoin price were added to the total supply of the cryptocurrency, resulting in a 0.7 percent increase in supply this year.

ETH issuance and burn rate

Base from cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase remains the most popular second-tier Efirium-based blockchain today. The average number of active addresses in it exceeds the level of one million units, which is more than the total result of its two closest competitors – Arbitrum and Optimism. Here is the corresponding graph.

Active addresses in Tier 2 networks based on Efirium

The Chainalysis analytics platform has another set of interesting statistics. Fraud activity in the crypto has declined since the beginning of the year, while inflows to legitimate services are at their highest level since the previous bullrun in 2021.

Here’s a quote on the matter, as cited by The Block.

Total illicit activity over the past year is down 19.6 percent, from $20.9 billion to $16.7 billion.

Financial flows in legal, suspicious and illegal sources

While the report says that overall criminal activity has declined since the beginning of the year, two categories of crime are tentatively defying the trend.

For example, flows of stolen funds nearly doubled, from $857 million to $1.58 billion. There was also a 2 percent increase in extortion software activity. We’re talking about an increase from $449.1 million to $459.8 million.

Largest payout volume of ransomware attacks by year

The average amount of crypto stolen per incident has increased by nearly 80 per cent since January. This is partly due to the rise in the price of Bitcoin, which accounted for 40 per cent of the total transaction volume in the statistics.


The current sag in the value of gas on the Efirium network is primarily indicative of Ethics fans using second-tier chains like Base, Optimism and Arbitrum, which is positive news for the ecosystem. However, it's important to realise that in the event of a blockchain-wide hype event like a popular Airdrop or the launch of an NFT collection from a celebrity, Ethereum commissions will immediately skyrocket as the blockchain is still characterised by low bandwidth. So it's something to be prepared for.