Ethereum Gas Fees Plummet Due to Increased Layer 2 Adoption and ETF Launches

The Ethereum ecosystem is witnessing a historic decline in gas fees, affecting both mainnet and Layer 2 transactions.

According to Etherscan Gas Tracker, the average gas fee on the mainnet is currently 4 Gwei, roughly $0.21, with the possibility of transactions being processed for as low as 3 Gwei, or around $0.14.

This decrease is also evident in Layer 2 solutions like Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, and Linea, where fees are under $0.01.

Experts attribute this fee reduction to the increased use of Layer 2 scaling solutions and the introduction of blob transactions with the Dencun hard fork in March, which has significantly lowered transaction costs on Layer 2 networks. Consequently, less ETH is being burned, leading to an inflationary trend in the network.

Over the past 24 hours, fewer than 200 ETH were burned, causing Ethereum’s supply to grow at a rate of 0.67%, based on ultrasound.money data. In the last 30 days, more than 60,000 ETH has been added to the network.

Last week, the SEC approved eight new spot Ethereum ETFs, including the conversion of Grayscale’s ETHE fund, for trading on US exchanges.

These ETFs attracted over $1 billion in inflows during their first four days of trading, though this was offset by around $1.5 billion outflows from Grayscale’s ETHE.