Median Ethereum gas fees have skyrocketed to a new all-time high of 485 Gwei on Sept. 1, according to Glassnode data.
To participate in the flourishing DeFi ecosystem, Ether users now have to shell out close to $5 per transaction.
Miners cash in on the DeFi craze
As reported by U.Today, decentralized exchange Uniswap trumped stablecoin issuer Tether as the biggest gas hog on the Ethereum blockchain in late August.
Because of its very loose listing policy, Uniswap traders can get exposure to flashy DeFi tokens before they end up on notable centralized exchanges.
Gas fees reaching new highs coincided with fresh milestones for DeFi's biggest unicorn, whose total trading volume is now above $10 bln.
Miners are the ones who are greatly benefiting from the high level of network congestion, bagging $500,000 worth of fees in one single hour.
Overall, ETH miners earned $113 mln in fees last month. Bitcoin miners, in comparison, earned three times less than that but fees represent only 10 percent of their total revenue.
The solution is already there
While the crypto community is clamoring about exorbitant fees that are crippling the DeFi ecosystem, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says that the fix is already there.
He claims that more people should use scaling solutions, such as ZK Sync, Loopring and OMG to conduct payments.
Seriously, scaling to 2500+ TPS for simple-payments applications is here, we just need to... use it.
Earlier today, Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino announced that the leading stablecoin issuer was mulling over adding support for ZK-rollups to speed up USDT transactions.