A single trader has just spent a staggering 64 Ether – equivalent to USD 118,000 – in gas fees by purchasing USD 155,000 of the memecoin denominated Four (FOUR).
According to one update of the popular blockchain tracking service ‘Whale Alert’, the trader paid a staggering $119,157 worth of Ether (ETH) to complete an Unsiwap trade which exchanged 84 Wrapped Ether (WETH) for 13.8 billion FOUR tokens.
A fee of 64 #ETH (119,121 USD) has just been paid for a single transaction!https://t.co/3w4UD0AZbw
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) May 8, 2023
It appears that the merchant had voluntarily increased his gas rate to speed up the transaction time to purchase the memecoin. According to the pseudonymous Twitter user “FlurETH”, the trader in question has 133 ETH ($245,667) of unrealized profit from his memecoin investment.
Gas rates on the Ethereum network have become the subject of debate among the cryptocurrency community, with a number of prominent Etheruem proponents praising the increased activity for its revenue-generating effects and long-term deflationary pressure on the Ethereum network. ether supply.
Arbitrum One, an Ethereum layer 2 network, just did more daily fee revenue than Bitcoin.
Not to mention that Ethereum itself did more than 28x the fee revenue of Bitcoin in the same time period. pic.twitter.com/plLEzdynNB
— sassal.eth (@sassal0x) April 20, 2023
Others have criticized the fees, alleging that, unless the network is more “affordable” it will never achieve mass adoption.
As we already told you in the past, One of the main drivers of the rise in Ethereum gas fees comes from the recent meme coin hysteria, fueled in large part by the frenzy of buying a new memecoin called Pepe (PEPE). At press time, Ethereum’s average transaction fee stands at $22.98, the highest level since May 12, 2022, when the average fee peaked at $31.11.
Another major reason behind the drastic increase in gas fees comes from the Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) trading bot which is trading memecoins en masse. The notorious MEV bot and “Sandwich Attacker”, known only by the pseudonym jaredfromsubway.eth, has been benefiting significantly from increased network usage.
A sandwich attack occurs when an attacker sandwiches a victim’s transaction between their own two transactions in order to manipulate the price to profit from the user.
On April 18, Jared liquidated a whopping $950,000 in profit from the sandwich attacks. Jared has also been one of the largest gas payers on the Ethereum network. On April 20, Jared used 7% of the total gas in the network and spent 455 ETH in transaction fees.
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