Ethereum (ETH) Gas Fee Spikes to 4-Month High, Could NFT Minting be the cause?

Ethereum transaction fee experienced a 4-month high today, at 7,300 gwei median gas price. Chinese Journalist, Colin Wu reported on Twitter that the trending NFT project, the Sevens could be the potential cause of the hike instead of its exceptional minting stats.

In just 24 hours’ span, the trading volume of The Sevens has soared up to 4193 ETH, along with its floor price of 1.35 ETH, at the time of reporting. According to Nansen, the median gas price on 7^th September, i.e., yesterday was as low as 200 gwei, which unexpectedly shot through the roof overnight, exploding into the current high.

Vitalik Buterin on resolving high gas fee on ETH blockchain

ETH Founder, Vitalik Buterin commented on the rise in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. He suggested that moving all NFTs to layer-two solutions can beat the high gas fees issue. According to Buterin, the mainstream blockchain is currently too crowded that is resulting in problems like, high transaction fees. He advised blockchains and NFTs to transfer to L2 to counter scalability issues. Furthermore, ETH founder highlighted that the NFT ecosystem is rapidly expanding and will soon grow “too big for one single rollup to handle safely”.

“All existing major EVM-capable rollup platforms have backdoors, centralized sequencing, or other training wheels, and it’s risky to commit an entire ecosystem to a single rollup while there is uncertainty about how the rollup will graduate beyond such features.”, wrote Buterin.

Standard Chartered is bullish on ETH

The high gas fee has not affected institutions’ bullish prediction of ETH. Standard Chartered’s latest report on the dominant cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum stated that the structural value of Ethereum is between the price bracket of $26,000 and $35,000. Furthermore, the bank’s analysts also expect ETH to provide higher returns as compared to BTC. However, the report also highlights a higher risk expectancy in ETH.

” The current price reflects both the relative complexity of ETH (versus BTC) and the uncertainty around ETH’s development…In other words, while potential returns may be greater for ETH than for BTC, risks are also higher,” said the bank.