Transaction fees for the top cryptocurrencies have experienced a significant increase recently, with Dash fees remaining some of the least expensive.
As public interest in digital assets has grown in recent months, the collective market cap for cryptocurrency has risen from $45 billion to $95 billion in the last month alone. With it, transaction fees for some of the top cryptocurrencies have risen accordingly. The seven-day moving average fee for Bitcoin is now $4.04 per transaction, excluding it from viability for most regular purchases. Monero’s fees come in second at $1.72, mostly due to a much higher data load because of its encrypted transactions many times larger than Bitcoin’s
Ethereum joins Bitcoin and Monero in the “high fee club”
While several coins are to be expected to have high fees, an unusual addition to the group is Ethereum. As its market cap grows past half of Bitcoin’s and as its usage increases accordingly, Ethereum’s fees have been on a significant upswing over the last month, growing from a seven-day moving average of about $0.25 to $0.90 at present. While this is still far from those of Bitcoin or Monero, such a fee still precludes Ethereum from efficient use for small transactions such as the proverbial cup of coffee.
Of the top coins, only Dash and Litecoin have retained low fees with no significant increase. Dash’s seven-day moving average for fees is $0.11, while Litecoin is close at $0.14. Unlike the other coins listed here, Dash also has the option to do instantly-confirmed transactions through the InstantSend function, which cost ten times as much as a regular transaction, likely driving the average transaction higher than it would otherwise be.
Long-term scaling solutions remain a hot topic
Now that digital currency is increasingly breaking into mainstream consciousness, the question of scaling to effortlessly handle the user load promised by mainstream adoption remains a hot topic. In the meantime, Bitcoin remains at an impasse in its scaling debate, as even the 2mb + SegWit compromise agreed upon by over 50 companies and over 80% of the network hashrate has been unable to prevent community divisions. This has provoked a rise of “cryptohooliganism,” with cryptocurrency fans using divisive and vitriolic approaches to promote their favorite projects.
I think Dash must be prepared for the scenario where the fees becomes a indicator of the network saturation. Dash has made a loable work developing important features, The time to call it and use it like “digital cash” in everyday transactions is arriving, so… what does Dash need to learn of past issues from other cryptocurrencies?…
I´ve read your post Joel…. and then I wrote some thougs that come in my mind: https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/attractive-sustainable-and-stable-transaction-fees.15226/
In regards to your forum post. I think it makes sense, and what I could suggest to do is to peg the transaction fee to a US Dollar value in dash. So it around approximately 25 or 50 cents worth of dash always. The difficulty is getting the most accurate exchange rate to utilize to help govern this transaction fee, and deciding where to store it. Also deciding how it accurately applies to transactions. Maybe it is double for instant send, or that feature has its own mechanics for how it works.
Some would say “but the system would lose money!”. I would counter that you would actually make more money not through the amount of the transaction fee, but through the ever increasing volume of transactions. This provides an incentive to the nodes/master nodes to accurately push through as many transactions as possible and provide high throughput because they would be making their money off the volume of transactions (as it relates to transaction fees) over the amount any individual transaction fee would be worth. I think this would be good for the increasing health and wealth of the network as well.
Whatever is done we want it to be a system that incentivizes improvements, fairness, and growth of the network. Always use greed to create a system that would reward the greedy by making things better. I think bitcoin is going the wrong direction in the way their incentives works at this point. Not their fault either, It was a good idea, but finally getting to see the dynamic of how these transaction fees work at scale reveals a less desirable side to it as far as the network health is concerned.
You have a big point here, set the fee amount in USD. I guess the rate can be aquired like an average amount of the main exchanges, or use the rate that coinmarketcap use, for example
Wow. I thought ETH was cheap to use. very interesting information thanks for the research.
Apparently it’s spiking because of all the ICO mania driving fees up.
I have a startup that I want to accept DASH as payment but it’s fees are a bit high. I’m accepting micropayments and also want to direct 2 party payouts. But not sure if DASH can do this. Any ideas?
That’s cool but let’s also put in the number of transactions Bitcoin processes compared with Dash. Can you even see Dash in green at the bottom?
That’s cool but let’s also put in the number of transactions Bitcoin processes compared with Dash. Can you even see Dash in green at the bottom? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6d4312d68c467a34535bc69826edb390644aa9dd05501e3056aa38b38bc11f09.png
So you are saying the more transactions a currency processes the more the fees should be? The facts are that DASH has significantly lower fees. When DASH reaches that volume I am sure they can quickly address the fee issue with a quick vote, avoiding conflicts and talks of forking.
It’s true that said fees can be correlated with transaction volume, however they’re indicative of a lack of scaling solutions. Right now Dash has the network capacity of several times Bitcoin’s. Whereas Bitcoin users must pay an increasingly high fee in order to get transactions through quickly, Dash has two modes: fast and instant. Even with massive bottlenecks, the max fee would have a hard cap, since “faster than instant” doesn’t exist. Even if Dash for some reason didn’t find a scaling solution like larger blocks, the backlog would only be for non-urgent transactions. Service wouldn’t be disrupted until we got to a point where so many transactions existed that the backlog would never be cleared. Which is at a much higher transaction level than Bitcoin right now.
And? The end-user doesn’t give a shit why your transaction fees are high. They only care about the transaction fee.
Steem has no fees my brother!
11 cents is hardly a hardship.
Isn’t the size of the transaction relevant to the transaction fee? Your comparison seems to compare Bitcoin transactions to Dash; however, what is the average size of the former and the latter? Is there a delta in the relative size of Dash’s transactions which might explain the lower transaction fee?
This article is sooooo misleading, I’m going to call it: FAKE NEWS!
Bitcoin and Dash (and all the others) each have different volumes of transactions occurring on their network. Since the transaction fee is relative to the transaction amount, you can’t just add up the total fees occurring on the network.. the total amount of fees incurred by all transactions for a period has nothing to do with the basis of that cost.
Seriously, I can’t believe someone would write a huge article like this and publish it based on information that’s so incredibly misleading. What editor even published this? It should be pulled from the site.
how can one have this information updated (on real time)
I’ve fetching the web for it and this is the most accurate comparison I have found,
but as you may know it can change in days, hours or even seconds.
Presented as neatly as it is here, I’m not sure where to find real-time updates. Bitinfocharts.com is great, just make sure you open up each currency’s dedicated page where they have the exact fee breakdowns.