Ethereum is being dogged by high gas fees – here’s how it’s affecting price
Despite the recent uncertainty surrounding ETH, the altcoin has continued to record fortnightly gains of over 11%.
- August alone saw the NFT market record transaction volumes in excess of AUD$1.35 billion.
- Most popular NFT projects including CryptoPunks, Art Blocks, BAYC have witnessed massive dips in their weekly trade volumes.
- The cost of facilitating a transaction on the Ethereum network rose as high as AUD$49 yesterday.
A little over a week ago, it appeared as though Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by total market capitalisation, was on its way to smashing its all-time high value of AUD$5,900 (approx.) that it had scaled up to earlier this year. However, over the last 7-day span, the altcoin has gone on to register an average loss of around 8%, with ETH currently trading at AUD$4,700.
As a result of this volatility, a massive decline in NFT sales – especially those related to digital collectible projects – was witnessed across the board. That said, to put things into perspective, total non-fungible token (NFT) sales globally were found to have exceeded the $1 billion dollar mark during August alone.
Lastly, it should be noted that amidst last week's price turbulence, the Ethereum network – which currently houses a bulk of the NFT market – was faced with a lot of transactional congestion. In fact, over the last 24 hours, the network's average fee rose as high as AUD$49, making the ecosystem practically unusable for most small-time retailers.
A closer look at the numbers
As per data made available by OpenSea, NFT sales on secondary markets have continued to subside through the first 10 days of September, with a number of highly touted projects including CryptoPunks, Art Blocks and BAYC witnessing massive 7-day trade dips of 85%, 82% and 69% respectively.
In fact, just 1 project in the top 20 has been able to record an increase in its 7-day trade volume: Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann's Loot (for Adventures) NFT, which saw its trade numbers go up by a cool 8+%.
Sotheby's recent NFT auction fetches a cool $24 million
Expected to fetch anywhere between USD$12-$18 million, the auction of Yuga Labs' 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection has gone on to smash all of its previous price projects by bagging a final bid of USD$24.39 million. To be a bit more elaborate regarding the specifics of the deal, the above-stated NFT bundle consists of 101 Bored Apes, and three M1 and three M2 "Mutant serum" NFTs.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner's guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing
