Ethereum Fees Sink to Lowest Rate in 7 Months, Most L2 Fees Under $1 per Transfer

Ethereum fees have continued to slide week after week and are now at the lowest value in seven months. On Tuesday, March 8, the average layer one (L1) Ethereum gas fee is 0.0042 ether or $10.89 per transfer. At the same time, median-sized gas fees are much lower as well, hitting values not seen since August last year.

While L1 ethereum (ETH) gas fees are nowhere near below $1 per transfer, ether transaction fees are continuing to drop from January’s highs. It’s possible there’s been less on-chain transaction activity and ETH fees may have been alleviated by the increased use of L2 protocols like Optimism, Arbitrum, and Polygon.

At the time of writing, the average gas cost to transact on the Ethereum blockchain is 0.0042 ETH or $10.89 per transfer. The last time average gas costs on Ethereum were this low was seven months ago on August 4, 2021. Similarly, median-sized ether fees are low as well, as data shows median-sized fees have not been this low since August 1, 2021.

Currently, the median-sized gas fee on the Ethereum blockchain is 0.0014 ETH or $3.73 per transfer. Both average and median-sized gas fees are much lower than the fees recorded on January 10, 2022. On that day, the average gas fee to transfer ethereum (ETH) was $52 per transaction. Average ETH fees haven’t been below $1 per transfer since August 2020, and median-sized fees jumped over $1 that same month, 19 months ago.

Even though the median-sized ether fee of $3.73 per transfer is cheap, ethereum (ETH) users who want to transfer for less than that are forced to leverage layer two (L2) protocols. In fact, L2 users will enjoy less than $1 fees on most L2 protocols available today.

At the time of writing, the cheapest L2 transaction fee stems from using Loopring at $0.06 per transfer. Furthermore, the cost to swap tokens via Loopring is $0.64 per transaction. Loopring’s ETH transfer rate is followed by Zksync ($0.09), Polygon Hermez ($0.25), Optimism ($0.38), Arbitrum ($0.44), Boba ($0.58), and Aztec ($1.50).

While it costs $0.64 per transaction to swap tokens via Loopring, it’s only $0.22 per swap leveraging the L2 protocol Zksync.

Do you think Ethereum fees will continue to slide lower over the next few weeks? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.