The ridiculously high cost of Gas on Ethereum

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It’s hard to overstate how comically ridiculous the Gas price is to send ETH nowadays. This truth is becoming more apparent because if you look at the token price for ETH, you’d have to acknowledge that it’s been booming over the past 45 days. 

For most normal people, the blockchain is pretty much unusable for average size transactions. Recently, to send an ERC20 token cost me over US$60. To complete a simple UniSwap trade can run between $60 and $100 for each transaction. Unless you’re willing to pay $100-$200, you can forget about a complex smart contract interaction—it’s a financial nightmare.

You don’t have to be a financial wizard to determine the prospect of paying transaction fees that often can exceed that of a traditional financial institution is not accretive to mass-adoption. The facts are evident: the Ethereum network is not fit for its stated purpose. 

Transactions need to be processed faster and cheaper for mainstream users. 

I’ve seen 700+ GWEI at one point, which represented a 190% increase since January 1. The devil’s bargain made for the token price surge is decimating the broad range of use cases for building on top of the technology. Its scaling limitations are being made bare while transaction volume on Bitcoin SV (BSV) continues rising with no discernible economic impact to users or devs. 

While ETH holders go nuts celebrating the price pump as the token touches a three-year high, users and developers of ETH are suffering. The inept developer’s team behind Ethereum seems incapable of fixing this problem on the primary smart contracts platform upon which most decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and decentralized apps (dApps) run.

While the project remains prominent in the digital currency space, its protocols certainly aren’t as structurally well put together as the Bitcoin SV network for providing an on-ramp for enterprises’ adoption into decentralized infrastructure. 

The Ethereum community is not well known for tolerating criticism of their hobby platform. Hopefully, Ethereum’s ineptitude will make more token holders realize that the profoundly ho-hum concept of scalability is, actually, kind of critical and something that blockchain protocols can’t live without it. 

If Ethereum’s goal is solely to be the blockchain of the wealthy for price speculation and large transactions, it may well be on its way to becoming just that. 

See also: TAAL’s Jerry Chan presentation at CoinGeek Live, The Shift from Bitcoin “Miners” to “Transaction Processors”