Recently you could already read in the Ethereum news that the gas fees, or transaction costs, had risen sharply on the Ethereum (ETH) network. The hype about meme coins had a significant contribution to this huge increase. However, this huge demand for meme coins has not died down at the moment and this is again reflected in the transaction costs on the layer-1 blockchain.
Many crypto investors will recall the situation of Ethereum during the previous bull market at the moment. During the second half of 2021, gas fees also reached enormous heights, which led to many irritations among users of the network.
Worry about ETH gas fees
Whale Alert tweeted that an Ethereum user paid as much as 64 ETH, which is worth $106,560 at the current Ethereum price, for one transaction on the network.
💸 A fairy of 64 #ETH (119,121 USD) has just been paid for a single transaction!https://t.co/3w4UD0AZbw
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) May 8, 2023
Concerns about ETH gas fees come into play every time during periods of high activity on the blockchain. This is seen by many in the crypto world as one of the biggest shortcomings of Ethereum at the moment. Many crypto investors saw the mergewhich had the network switch from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), as the update that would put an end to sky-high transaction costs.
However, the merge was not aimed at solving this problem and future updates to Ethereum will improve the scalability of the network. The merge changed the consensus mechanism and reduced the network’s massive power consumption by as much as 99%.
Meme coins hype
The meme coin Pepe (PEPE) is the true leader of the current boom in meme coins. Out of nowhere, the meme coin has exploded in popularity and turned investors into millionaires with a small investment. For example, you recently read that an early PEPE buyer saw an investment of $263 rise to approximately $12.8 million.
Even on the Bitcoin (BTC) network, meme coins have been massively created on the network since the advent of the BRC-20 token standard. Yesterday, Binance even had to temporarily suspend BTC withdrawals due to the congestion on the blockchain.