Ethereum Miner Revenue Hit $800,000 Per Hour This Week

The revenue from Ethereum mining has skyrocketed to $800,000 this week, new data from analytics firm Glassnode shows. Attributed primarily to increasing transaction fees, analysts expect it to keep growing as the hype surrounding decentralized finance (DeFi) continues.

Ethereum miner revenue increased to $800,000 per hour on Tuesday, beating the previous day's record of $500,000, excluding anomalous transaction fees. The firm attributed this to rising transaction fees which, according to news outlet Decrypt, reached $16.5 million on Tuesday. It was $8.1 million the previous day.

The chart from Glassnode suggests the transaction fees have been rising steadily, but the most noticeable spike happened on Tuesday and has been sustained until the next day. On Friday, Ethereum’s price dropped to $381, a fallout from Bitcoin’s similar price drop on the same day. With the drop in Ethereum’s prices, fees have subsided to around $500,000 per hour.

This figure is notable because by comparison, Bitcoin miners have generated $1.5 million on Sept. 1. Larry Cermak, the head of research at The Block, says the Ethereum transaction fees are now 3.7 times higher than of 2017, when the Bitcoin hit an all-time high.

The transaction fees on Ethereum have been getting out of hand to the point that such fees would hinder normal users from participating. As an experiment, this writer tried sending 0.1 ETH to buy another cryptocurrency through Uniswap. At $400 per 1 ETH, 0.1 ETH is $40, and the fee stands at $40 as well.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has acknowledged the higher fees and reiterated that users should use layer-two technology to get around the issue. "Well then more people should be accepting payments directly through zksync/loopring/OMG," he said on Twitter, referring to technologies built on top of the Ethereum blockchain that can do 2500+ transactions per second. "We just need to… use it," the Ethereum founder added.