Ethereum gas prices giving room for network competition

When it comes to high gas prices, it’s not drivers of combustion-engine vehicles that are doing all the complaining. Turns out, Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD) users have their own gas problem, too.

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As you may know, cryptocurrency has evolved from the days when merely the ability to facilitate cross-border transactions was good enough to get you on the front row of the blockchain revolution. Ethereum represented one of the early pioneers of what you might term utilitarian blockchains or decentralized networks that could replace multiple centralized components of traditional economies.

For Ethereum, it brought to the crypto lexicon the concept of the smart contract, a binding agreement between two parties minus the middleman. In its place, an immutable protocol would determine (perfectly and without bias) whether the parties fulfilled he terms of the underlying contract. If integrated into mainstream functions, the smart contract innovation could forever revolutionize business transactions.

Except that there’s one problem: as the Ethereum network became increasingly popular, so did the transactions that undergirded the ETH community. Obviously, any expenditure of effort or energy comes at a cost. For ETH users, this cost materializes in the form of transaction fees, known as gas.

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