To use a blockchain, you need gas, just like you need fuel to drive a car. Just as it is more expensive to drive during rush hour, executing an Ethereum blockchain transaction is more expensive as all lanes on Ethereum highway are jammed! But how busy is the Ethereum blockchain, and how much do users of decentralized exchanges spend to swap one token for another? Let’s find out in this post.
In order to understand gas costs on the Ethereum blockchain, we will look into fees spent by users of Sushiswap and Uniswap to swap tokens. The following chart shows the fees users paid for gas on Suhiswap & Uniswap distributed exchanges between December 21 and January 22. A total of 471 million dollars was spent on just gas fees, with 86% of that being spent on Uniswap to complete 5.1 million swap transactions. Another 13.28% of transactions, 826K transactions, were conducted on Sushiswap and consumed 62.61 million worth of gas.
What is the average gas fee per transaction on Uniswap & Sushiswap? The following chart shows average gas fees paid by Sushiswap and Uniswap users for the past 60 days. In the first week of December, Uniswap used to cost 115$ per transaction, while Sushiwap costs 113$ due to high ETH prices during December. In comparison to early December, the Ethereum network is equally busy now, but it costs less per swap, and the Ether token price is around 2600$ due to recent drop in crypto token price across the board.
As you can see from the chart, the average cost to swap tokens on Sushiswap is lower than that on Uniswap most of the time. If you are wondering why, it is due to the complexity of the smart contracts code! Uniswap uses about 170K units of gas, while Sushiswap requires less gas. The following chart displays the average gas consumed by Sushiswap and Uniswap transactions over the past 60 days.