Ethereum average gas fees drop 95% one year after the Dencun upgrade

2 weeks ago

The mean Ethereum state interest has dropped by 95% successful the twelvemonth pursuing the Dencun upgrade, 1 of Ethereum’s astir important web improvements.

On March 13, 2024, Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade was rolled out. The upgrade combined the Cancun upgrade connected the execution furniture and the Deneb upgrade connected the statement layer. It besides introduced 9 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs).

The superior extremity was to heighten Ethereum’s scalability and trim transaction costs for layer-2 networks. According to YCharts data, Ethereum’s mean state interest has fallen from 72 gwei successful 2024 to conscionable 2.7 gwei arsenic of March 12, 2025.

Last year, an mean swap outgo users $86 successful fees, portion non-fungible token income averaged $145 successful state fees. At the clip of writing, Etherscan information showed that an mean swap would outgo $0.39, portion an NFT merchantability would mean $0.65.

Ether terms has dropped 53% since the Dencun Upgrade

Despite the crisp driblet successful state fees, Ether (ETH) terms has declined by 53% since the Dencun upgrade.

During the upgrade successful March 2024, ETH was trading supra $4,070. One twelvemonth later, arsenic of March 13, 2025, ETH was valued astatine astir $1,891, according to CoinGecko data.

In a connection sent to Cointelegraph, Dominik Harz, the co-founder of hybrid layer-2 Build connected Bitcoin (BOB), said Ethereum has “underperformed” recently:

“Monday’s terms driblet erased each DeFi TVL gains since Trump’s election. Between Solana’s memecoin frenzy and Ethereum’s fractured fewer months, it’s wide the manufacture is searching for a new, much sustainable and unafraid frontier for DeFi.”

Upcoming Pectra upgrade sees hiccups

On March 5, Ethereum’s adjacent large upgrade, Pectra, rolled retired connected its last testnet, Sepolia. However, the squad started seeing mistake messages and bare blocks being mined.

Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden confirmed that a hole was deployed, but an chartless idiosyncratic aboriginal triggered the aforesaid error, starring to further issues. The improvement squad has since managed to stabilize the testnet and successfully process transactions.

Harz said that portion these testnet issues are “disrupting the mainnet launch,” they are acold from Ethereum’s biggest problems. The enforcement said that erstwhile Pectra goes live, it volition treble the disposable information abstraction for layer-2s, trim costs and summation execution capacity.

“While that’s a measurement successful the close direction, the world is that Ethereum is rapidly losing its presumption arsenic the go-to concatenation for builders, and Pectra isn’t the fix-all solution to its deeper issues,” Harz said.