Ethereum base fees reaches new ATH as Otherdeed NFT sale burns 55k ETH ($150k) in less than 3 hours!

EDIT: Can not edit title, but it should of course be $150 million, not $150k.

Some people have probably noticed the gas fees for Ethereum transactions in the last few hours reaching levels of up to 7000 gWEI and beyond. At these prices a single swap transaction on Uniswap will cost you up to $3000 in gas, and a simple ETH transaction (the cheapest transaction possible) will cost more than $400.

This is due to the sale of the ApeCoin related Otherdeed NFTs which have been highly anticipated. The rush of people trying to mint some of the limited NFTs has caused a gas war like never seen before.

Each NFT minted during this rush would cost the minter on average about 2 ETH in fees, and with the Otherdeed contract approaching 40 000 transactions (https://etherscan.io/address/0x34d85c9cdeb23fa97cb08333b511ac86e1c4e258) this adds up. For reference the sale was started in this transaction about 3 hours ago at the time of this post (https://etherscan.io/tx/0x257f966c3d155cf45e213f8919d0e0b26fc8737034f28f54c00a0f4e2410ed38).

An example of a mint transaction can be found here (https://etherscan.io/tx/0x6abe015124f89b6d546e806c163d709e0c8d95ab0922e8b2064394e51bbf1b22) where $7 330 was spent in gas, and APE worth $11 200 was used to buy 2 NFTs. At the writing of this post those 2 NFTs are worth in total about $45k (likely to be very different when you read this), meaning the minter seemingly made a good trade despite the fees.

In total this single contract has burned 55k ETH (which is worth $150 million at current prices) in less than 3 hours, accounting for more than 75% of fees spent on the Ethereum network during these few hours (more than 80% if you include APE and OpenSea transactions related to Otherdeed).

During this time a new record for most ETH fees burned in a single block was also reached, this block burned almost 221 ETH (https://etherscan.io/block/14688922). For those not familiar with why ETH is burned this is due to the changes introduced in EIP1559 where the base fee is burned.

After the sale was over hundreds of transactions attempting to mint NFTs kept coming in and failing, costing the sender thousands of dollars in gas despite not resulting in a minted NFT. The amount of gas wasted by people making approvals or sending ETH around only to not be able to participate in the sale has also been very high, which is unfortunate for those people.

Overall a interesting event to watch unfold, especially looking at all that ETH being burned. At the time of writing this post the gas price has already started to normalize, and is now down to "only" a few hundred gWei.

News article about the sale: https://watcher.guru/news/bayc-otherside-metaverse-otherdeeds-sells-100-million-worth-plots-in-minutes