A year since Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, the network’s average gas fee has fallen by 95%, making transactions significantly cheaper.
The upgrade, which went live on March 13, 2024, merged two significant upgrades: the Cancun upgrade for Ethereum’s execution layer and the Deneb upgrade for its consensus layer.
Together, they introduced nine Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) aimed at reducing transaction costs and improving scalability, especially for layer-2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync.
Prior to the upgrade, gas fees were out of control. During 2024, the average Ethereum gas price was approximately 72 gwei. As of March 12, 2025, it had plummeted to a mere 2.7 gwei, based on figures provided by YCharts. This makes normal transactions significantly less expensive.
For instance, last year, token swapping on Ethereum was costing about $86 in fees, and selling NFTs was costing about $145 in gas fees. But now, a typical token swap only costing $0.39, while selling an NFT is costing about $0.65, as per statistics from Etherscan.
Although gas prices have decreased considerably, Ether’s (ETH) price has dipped 53% since the upgrade. ETH traded at $4,070 in March 2024, but currently, after a year, stands at about $1,891, as per CoinGecko.
Build on Bitcoin (BOB) co-founder Dominik Harz thinks Ethereum is in trouble. He mentioned how the recent price decline erased all the DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) gains since Trump’s election.
He also stated that Ethereum has had a tough couple of months, whereas Solana has experienced high levels of activity, especially with memecoins.
Ethereum’s upcoming big upgrade, Pectra, is already running into issues. The upgrade was released on the Sepolia testnet on March 5, 2025, but developers began experiencing errors. Blocks were mined with zero transactions, and error messages kept popping up.
Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden confirmed that they rolled out a patch, yet someone unknown initiated the same error again and more issues appeared. The Ethereum team stabilized the testnet at last, and the transactions are being processed normally.
Also Read: Why is ETH Price Crashing? Are We Headed to $1,000 Now?
