Ethereum Gas Fees at an 8-Month Low as Interest in NFTs, DeFi Wanes
As the DeFi and NFT activity began to cool down, Ethereum gas fees declined significantly and are now hovering around 20-24 Gwei, depending upon the time required for confirmation.
According to the crypto market data aggregation and analytics site, Cryptorank, the gas fees for transactions on the Ethereum (ETH) network have dropped to the lowest levels since August 2021.
The figure has been declining since the beginning of this year. The latest stats show that a low-speed confirmation of around 6 mins 45 secs would require 20 Gwei, a medium speed confirmation of around 2 mins would require 22 Gwei, and a high-speed confirmation of around 45 secs would require 24 Gwei. Over the past three months, gas fees shredded almost 90%.
DeFi TVL Plummets
The Total Value Locked (TVL) in Ethereum’s DeFi has hit an all-time low. According to data compiled by DeFi Llama, Ethereum’s share of DeFi TVL fell below 55% in recent weeks. After hitting multiple new highs in the last quarter of 2021, the figures have come down owing to the waning interest in the sector. At the time of writing, the TVL figures stood at $109 billion and accounted for a 54.5% in DeFi market value.
Protocols have been branching out of Ethereum. Even though it continues to be the market leader, other networks such as Terra, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Fantom have proved viable to the users by eliminating the obvious bottlenecks caused by high transaction fees and low throughput.
However, after a remarkable 2021, the entire DeFi ecosystem has witnessed a prolonged period of a market slump. Most of the networks are in deep red despite recovering only mildly over the last 24-hours.
NFT Sales Takes A Hit
The hype surrounding the non-fungible token (NFT) space was one of the key drivers in the astonishingly high gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain and the subsequent network congestion. Even as the year began with a bang for NFTs, the momentum has slowed down rapidly. According to market tracker NonFungible, the average sale price of an NFT is now around $1k as opposed to more than $6,800 just two months ago.
Moreover, activity in one of the world’s largest NFT marketplace – OpenSea – has also cooled down. Daily transactions on the platform had hit an ATH of around $360 million in the first week of February and have been on a decline ever since.
As of March 9, the figures stood at $68.2 million. Daily NFT transactions have also taken a hit from a high above 120k to 109k in a span of less than three weeks.
