The daily cost of using Ethereum, the world’s most versatile blockchain and the platform behind ether (ETH), the second-biggest cryptocurrency, has dropped to an eight-month low.
Users paid only 1,719 ETH ($2.8 million) on Sunday for executing transactions on Ethereum, the lowest amount since Dec. 26 last year, according to CryptoQuant, a blockchain analytics firm based in South Korea.
That’s a 89% decline from the peak of 16,720 ETH recorded on May 5 this year. Ethereum relies on a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, which means that validators, not miners, are responsible for creating and verifying blocks of transactions.
Validators are participants who help secure the network by staking at least 32 ETH. They receive transaction fees, but not all of them.
They only get the priority fee or the tip that users add to the base fee to incentivize validators to process their transactions faster. The base fee, on the other hand, is burned, reducing the supply of ETH.
