⛽Gas Fee Spikers Aren't Exclusive to Ethereum
🌋Ethereum has a huge gas fee problem. But siblings like Solana and Avalanche have much smaller fees, they aren't immune to gripes either as they scale.
Over the last few weeks ago, the debate over Ethereum's high gas fees and usability heated up again, at a time when rival smart contracts networks like Solana and Avalanche are gaining traction.
Gas fees are likely to remain a huge issue in DeFi—no matter which chain you use, especially as the projects scale and users onboard.
Ethereum, the first and most popular smart contract-enabled layer-one blockchain, is extremely expensive to use. Simple token swaps on decentralized exchanges can cost hundreds of dollars, let alone more complex DeFi activity like yield farming or minting NFTs.
While this isn’t a particularly new phenomenon and Gas fees were the talk of the Crypto town when crypto game called CryptoKitties went viral and wreaked similar havoc on Ethereum’s gas fees.
Thankfully, gas fees eventually balanced , but these days, they're back with a vengeance.
year throughout this bull market, which we could say started around January 2020, fees on Ethereum have remained a painful topic of discussion for users. There have certainly been spikes and drops, but the average price of gas has never been this high for this long. That’s because as the bull run continues, more users pile into the network each day.
This conversation has been for adaption for competing networks, particularly Solana and Avalanche. They claim a faster and cheaper crypto experience as Ethereum, minus the prohibitive cost of transacting.
For the most part, these networks have made good on their promises.
A batch of recent transactions on Solana has a cost of just 0.000005 SOL or, at today’s prices, $0.00107, a fraction of a penny. On Avalanche, the price of transacting is also low, with the average transaction cost hovering at around 58 nAVAX, or $0.0000064525. Just 1 nAVAX equals 0.000000001 AVAX, by the way.
For context, paying just $50 US to mint an NFT through Ethereum currently costs about $156. The same transaction on Avalanche costs 0.00055 SOL, or $7.13.
If you just joined crypto and only now catching up with this conversation, choosing between the two chains is pretty easy. Spending roughly $1 instead of more than $100 for the same service is a no-brainer.