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December 14, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Binance wallet spends almost $1M in ETH gas fees in one day

September 21, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Binance wallet spends almost M in ETH gas fees in one day

Binance reportedly said that they were doing a wallet aggregation process to ensure the safety of user funds.

A crypto wallet belonging to trading platform Binance has spent 530 Ether (ETH), worth around $843,797, in gas fees in just 24 hours, according to blockchain data explorer Etherscan.

On Sept. 21, gas fees on the Ethereum network went from a minimum of 6 gwei, which is around $0.17, up to a maximum of 332 gwei, which is around $11.2, per transaction. The spike in gas prices was attributed to a wallet belonging to Binance called “Binance 14,” which spent almost $1 million on ETH network gas prices.

*30-day gas usage chart for the Binance crypto wallet. Source: Dune Analytics*

Members of the community expressed their opinions on the huge gas fees spent by the exchange. Web3 investor Belinda Zhou described Binance engineers as "incapable," and said that they've got the configuration wrong and set the gas allowance too high.

Adam Cochran, a partner at venture capital firm Cinneamhain Ventures, believes that the unusual gas fees were a result of substandard APIs. The executive criticized the exchange's technology and shed doubt on its ability to keep "hundreds of billions in coins across multiple protocols" safe.

Meanwhile, Binance reportedly said that they were doing their wallet aggregation process when the gas fees were low to ensure the safety of user funds.

Cointelegraph reached out to Binance for comments but did not get an immediate response.

Binance has constantly been on the radar of critics as it’s entangled in controversies amid its legal battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commissions. On Sept. 21, the crypto exchange’s CEO Changpeng Zhao refuted a report that he loaned $250 million from BAM Management, a firm that acts as the holding company of the exchanges’ US counterpart. According to Zhao, the loan was the other way around, with him lending the funds to the company.

Magazine: Binance’s exec exodus, Nasdaq to trade AI orders and SBF loses bail appeal: Hodler’s Digest, Sept. 3-9

Vitalik: L2 transaction fees need to be under 5c to be ‘truly acceptable’

May 4, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Despite Layer-2s offering relatively cheap transactions, Vitalik Buterin said that all transactions need to be under $0.05 to be truly acceptable.

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that Layer-2 transaction fees need to be under $0.05 to be “truly acceptable.”

Buterin made the latest comments in response to a Twitter post from the Bankless podcast host Ryan Sean Adams, who shared a screenshot of the average transaction fees for eight Ethereum Layer-2 platforms.

The data is from L2fees.info, a website that compares the cost of Ether’s Layer-1 network in comparison to Layer-2s built on top of it.

The only Layer-2 to meet Buterin’s desired transaction fee under $0.05 is the Metis Network at $0.02, however a token swap on the platform still costs $0.14. Fees sharply increase from there, at $0.12 per transaction on Loopring and going all the way to $1.98 per transaction on the Aztec Network.

Ethereum’s Layer-1 is relatively affordable at present at $3.26 per transaction and a whopping $16.31 per token swap, however that only lasts until Yuga Lab’s releases another collection of NFTs where fees can skyrocket to $14,000 per mint.

Adams emphasized the importance of Layer-2s for keeping Ethereum affordable, noting that “this is Ethereum and it's not expensive,” but Buterin suggested it wasn’t there yet:

“Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we're definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!”

Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we're definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 3, 2022

Buterin’s affordable transaction goal is a long held one that he first stated during an interview in 2017 that “the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction."

In January, Buterin said he still stood by this goal “100%” as part of a lengthy Twitter thread going over some of the key things he’s said or written over the past 10 years.

“That was the goal in 2017, and it's still the goal now. It's precisely why we're spending so much time working on scalability” Buterin said.

Short term gas fee reduction

The proto-danksharding or EIP-4844 that Buterin referred to as putting downward pressure on fees in his response to Adams, is a recently proposed upgrade to Ethereum that will see key elements of danksharding — a new and simplified design of previous sharding designs — implemented onto the network without any sharding upgrades being initiated.

Proto-danksharding will enable a new type of transaction dubbed the “blob-carrying transaction” that carries an extra 125KB worth of data (blob) that cannot be accessed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The general idea is that this will help the network scale significantly in the short term while reducing congestion and competition for gas usage, thus lowering gas fees.

“Because validators and clients still have to download full blob contents, data bandwidth in proto-danksharding is targeted to 1 MB per slot instead of the full 16 MB. However, there are nevertheless large scalability gains because this data is not competing with the gas usage of existing Ethereum transactions,” Buterin wrote in a blog post last month.

While Ethereum’s roadmap is notoriously flexible the shard chains upgrade is slated for sometime in 2023 well after the merge of the Mainnet with the Beacon Chain.

Shard chains provide avenues to horizontally and cheaply store data across the network, which in turn spreads the load, reduces congestion and increases transaction speeds. Both Ethereum and its Layer-2s are expected to benefit from this dramatically.

Ethereum gas fees drop to lowest levels since August 2021

March 10, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Data also shows that the average gas price on the Ethereum has been dropping rapidly since the start of the year, plunging from 218 Gwei on Jan.10 to 40.82 on March 9.

Gas fees for transactions on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain have dropped to the lowest levels since August. But they’re still not cheap.

According to data sourced from Coinmetrics and shared by CryptoRank Platform, the seven-day moving average cost of an Ethereum transaction as of March 9 totaled $11.14, placing it back amongst the levels recorded mid-last year before it surged dramatically to as high as $55 at the tail end of 2021.

The cost of transactions on the @Ethereum network has not been this low since Aug 2021. Notably, gas prices surged after staying in this range for about 3 months with experts attributing the spike to a rise in interest in the #NFT and #DeFi ecosystems.

https://t.co/oLDJyfSea2 pic.twitter.com/ieigvLT4Gz
— CryptoRank Platform (@CryptoRank_io) March 9, 2022

At the time of writing there appears to be minimal network congestion, with Etherscan data estimating gas fees to cost around 30 Gwei ($1.53) for a low-speed confirmation to 32 Gwei ($1.64) for a high-speed confirmation.

Ycharts data also shows that the average gas price of Ether has been dropping rapidly since the start of the year, plunging all the way from 218 Gwei on Jan.10 to 40.82 Gwei as on yesterday.

Amid booming growth of Ethereum’s nonfungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) sectors in 2021, the network has come under fire on multiple occasions for its outrageously expensive gas fees.

Lower congestion and lower fees appear correlated with waning speculation or interest in NFTs and DeFi during the start of this year compared to late 2021.

In terms of the last 30 days, DappRadar data shows that nine out the 10 top marketplaces on Ethereum have seen decreased trading volume, with first-placed LooksRare and second-placed OpenSea both shedding 78.27% and 34.75% apiece. Other notable losses include SuperRare and Rarible with 73.29% and 80.65% each.

Ethereum-based DeFi too is also suffering too, with eight out of the top 10 projects in all-seeing red over the past month in terms of total value locked (TVL) and native asset token price.

Solana extends rally with another new high — Why is SOL price up by 70% in one week?

September 3, 2021 Coin Telegraph

audius

The SOL price rally also appeared in the wake of “Ignition,” a global hackathon to build new platforms on the Solana blockchain.

Solana (SOL) started Friday at a new record high as investors continued to bet positively on its success in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFT) sector.

The SOL/USD exchange rate reached $146.28 for the first time in history, following a 35% month-to-date rally. The huge upside move lifted the pair’s returns for the year above 7,500%, taking Solana’s market capitalization over $41 billion to make it the seventh-most valuable project in the cryptocurrency space.

Solana’s run-up to record highs also brought overvaluation risks in focus, with a classic momentum indicator, the relative strength index (RSI), returning an overbought reading for the cryptocurrency. Above 70, the RSI suggested that SOL/USD could undergo a sell-off in the coming sessions and that opening a long position on the pair could prove risky.

*SOL/USD daily chart featuring RSI. Source: TradingView*

But analysts noted that it is hard to call the Solana top just yet. An independent market analyst, known by the pseudonym The Crypto Dog, advised speculators to just let Solana ride and see where it goes with its current strength.

Yuriy Mazur, head of data analytics at cryptocurrency exchange CEX.IO, anticipates that SOL/USD rates will cross above $150 in the coming sessions. But he, too, noted that the pair had entered a “price discovery” stage, and its upcoming bias relies on how well Solana emerges in the DeFi and the NFT space.

“The price of Solana (SOL) is on the uptrend as the blockchain is currently showcasing its potentials in serving as a viable alternative hub for all things Decentralized Finance and Nonfungible Tokens,” Mazur told Cointelegraph via email.

“The growth of Solana to $146.28 is steered positively by the increasing demand for the tokens for use in minting thousands of NFTs being launched on the Solana blockchain.”

On most NFT and DeFi platforms, users pay for the transaction costs required to process and validate transactions on the blockchain. The so-called gas fees change as per the network. Ethereum hosts most NFT and DeFi projects via smart contracts supporting its native token Ether (ETH), though this is also why the network suffers from excessive fee issues.

Mazur said investors now consider Solana a potential long-term rival to Ethereum, especially when providing lower gas fees and higher scalability. He cited Audius, a blockchain-enabled music streaming platform that integrated Solana to support its NFT project.

“Solana is still proving itself to be a resilient and a better alternative to Ethereum,” the analyst explained.

“It has a long way to go in terms of becoming a major DeFi and NFT infrastructure [...] However, to sustain its growth, better upgrades and features must be unveiled to beat competition from other blockchains, including Cardano and Ethereum.”

Mysterious event revealed as a hackathon

More bullish backstops for Solana appeared following its global hackathon launch, dubbed as Ignition, on Tuesday, which will run until Oct. 8. The contest attempts to draw talent and ideas to the Solana public blockchain to drive growth and innovation.

Ignition will distribute over $5 million worth of rewards and seed funding, including prizes from event sponsors, such as Microsoft, Jump Capital and Standard Chartered. Mango Markets, the leading Solana-based decentralized exchange and the winner of one of the recent hackathons, will also add $30,000 to the prize reserves.

Speculators earlier misidentified Ignition as a SOL burning event, which helped to send SOL prices above $100 for the first time in history on Monday.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

Ethereum Gas Fees