Ethereum miners increased the ETH transaction level to a new high within this week.
The Ethereum network experienced a flood of low-value transactions, the load exceeded over 1.1 million payment orders within the past few days, the TrustNodes reported. The average value of a transaction sat at around 0.05 ETH, which turns to be roughly around $ 11.70.
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The number especially peaked on June 23, when the total amount of transactions reached 1.119 million. The number was close to the all-time high (ATH) of 1.349 million transactions, last seen in January 2018, according to Etherscan data.
Reportedly, the largest part of small transactions came from the mining pool Ethermine, which performed 13.200 low-value transactions within 24 hours. Other pools like SparkPool and NanoPool behaved accordingly and flooded the network with loads of transactions, that were mostly equal to 0.05 ETH or even lower. According to Trustnodes:
They seem to be doing it in bursts, having a quiet period and then they turn on some sort of machine, flooding the network with transactions.
The reason behind network congestion
While the current average ETH transaction fee is around $0.65 for the time of publishing, the speculations of spamming the network started to emerge. The main theory, raised by the Trustnodes, suggests that miners are making transactions in order to receive a reward for mining ETHs.
The version seems logical, having in mind the event of a mysterious $5.2 million worth transaction fee that occurred on the Ethereum network earlier this month. Two highly unusual transactions were made by the same sender and included the amounts up to 350 ETH, however, the transaction fees accordingly lingered around $2.6 million per each.
Since the owner of the transaction had not appeared within the time given to regain funds, Bitfly, an operator of the Ethermine pool as well as SparkPool decided to distribute the fees among the miners.
In the meantime, as some transactions are as small as 0.001 ETH, which equals to around $0.25, the fact suggests that the real value should be lying in the reward that miners get for making a transaction.
The latest increased demand on the Ethereum network is not the first. The network has been congested previously when the leading ERC-20 stablecoin Tether (USDT) processed a high volume of transactions.
Moreover, Ethereum is a popular network for decentralized applications (dApps), whose industry grew over 82% during the past year. Furthermore, the category of Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) apps boomed up to nearly 800%. The industry also accumulates loads of payments on the Ethereum network.
As it is known, Ethereum miners initiated the voting on raising the gas limit on the Ethereum network. The fact would allow a greater transaction throughput, which means the higher number of transactions might be performed every second.
