Did Someone Just Pay Over $39,000 in Gas Fees for Ethereum Transaction?

Ethereum's (ETH) gas wars may be going parabolic as a transaction allegedly costs more than $39,000, or 24.225 ETH. The snapshot of the transaction cost was shared on Twitter by crypto investor and analyst Jason Williams, who sarcastically teased that Ethereum is "working great" despite the bogus amount being paid as gas fees.

Ethereum working great! only $39,050 in gas fees for a transaction... pic.twitter.com/lBjDkNse2Y

— Jason A. Williams (@GoingParabolic) January 22, 2023

While it remains unclear what the transaction was that Williams referred to, the tweet lends reality to how far the Ethereum network still has to go with respect to combating gas wars and the likelihood of users paying a very high amount for transaction fees.

One of the major concerns of Ethereum users prior to The Merge was that transaction costs were going through the roof. At the time, it was not uncommon for users to pay a relatively larger amount than the real value of their transaction. While the transition to proof of stake (PoS) helped expand the bandwidth of the network, a significant plunge in gas may not be experienced until other upgrades of the new PoS network are activated.

As part of the efforts to make the Ethereum protocol more usable, Vitalik Buterin has reiterated his commitment to helping develop rollup technologies for Layer 2 networks.

Ethereum killers to take advantage

The high gas requirement of Ethereum has caused the protocol a lot of reputation damage in the past, and if this high transaction fee is returning, it may help boost the acceptance of the so-called Ethereum killers.

The majority of new-generation blockchain protocols, including Cardano, Avalanche, Solana and BNB Chain, offer users cheaper transaction costs that have made many protocols rethink choosing Ethereum. In fact, the Yuga Labs team had to move its native token, ApeCoin (APE), from Ethereum to Polygon because of skyrocketing gas fees that were tearing up the community at the time.

Should the gas wars be returning, the so-called Ethereum killers may be benefitting more in the near term.