Bitcoin & Ethereum Fees Jump Up As Holders Rush To Sell

Data shows both Bitcoin and Ethereum have observed a spike in the transaction fees over the past couple of days as holders have rushed to sell amid the crash.

Bitcoin & Ethereum Transaction Fees Shoot Up

The “transaction fees” is an amount that users making transactions on the network have to pay in order to send the transfers through.

Depending on the crypto network, either part of the transaction fee or the entirety of it goes to the miners (or the validators).

When there are a large number of transactions happening on the network and the mempool becomes clogged, these miners start prioritizing transactions with the highest fees attached to them.

Related Reading | Market Liquidations Cross $1.22 Billion Following Bitcoin’s Decline Below $23,000

In such times, users who want their transfers to go through quicker and not be stuck waiting start putting a higher fee.

If network activity remains raised, users start paying an even higher fees in order to outcompete the others, thus leading to the network average shooting up.

As pointed out by an analyst in a CryptoQuant post, the Bitcoin mean fees per transaction observed a large spike as the crypto’s price plummeted down.

The below chart shows this trend in the indicator.

Looks like the average fees on the BTC network spiked up yesterday | Source: CryptoQuant

Much like BTC, the Ethereum blockchain also saw a huge increase in demand over the past day as investors rushed to sell during the crash.

Here is a chart that shows the trend in the ETH mean max fees per gas over the past few weeks:

The value of the metric seems to have been raised over the past couple of days | Source: CryptoQuant

The “max fee” is the fee per gas that users can maximally attach when submitting a transaction on the Ethereum network.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Will Hit $100K In 12 Months, Ex-White House Chief Predicts, Despite Crypto Carnage

BTC & ETH Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $22k, down 25% in the last seven days. Over the past month, the crypto has shed 25% in value.

The below chart shows the trend in the price of the coin over the last five days.

BTC went to as low as below $21k before rebounding back to the current level of $22k | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

As for Ethereum, the crypto is trading around $1.2k right now, down 32% in the past week. Monthly losses for the coin stand at 41%.

Below is the price chart for ETH over the last five days.

ETH went down to a low of less than $1.1k during the crash over the past couple of days | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, CryptoQuant.com