Dune: Ethereum's median average transaction fee jumped to ~87 gwei on May 2, the highest level since May 2022, mostly due to memecoin trading exploding again
Adam Morgan McCarthy / The Block :
Context & Ripple Effects
This spike fits a pattern the coverage has documented repeatedly: Ethereum's fee market lurches with speculative activity, as when Glassnode recorded $166.4M in monthly fees during the 2020 DeFi run-up before volumes dropped. The immediate trigger here is memecoin trading, a sector whose issuance machine has only accelerated since — Dune counted ~1.7M new tokens entering circulation in H1 2024 versus 264K a year earlier, with Pump.fun alone clearing $100M+ in revenue from its own 1% take.
Why it matters: the same Dune dashboards later show how completely these bursts reverse — the seven-day average fee fell to $0.77 by February 2025, the lowest since July 2020, and daily ether burn hit an all-time low weeks afterward. The May 2023 peak is best read as the top of another speculative cycle rather than a new baseline.
First-order effects
- Memecoin traders bid up block space to ~87 gwei at the median, raising transaction costs for every Ethereum user, not just the speculators causing the congestion.
- Higher fees flow straight into the ether-burn mechanism Dune tracks — the same metric that later registered an all-time-low daily burn once activity cooled.
Second-order effects
- Sustained mainnet pricing pushes high-volume, low-value trading toward purpose-built venues: Pump.fun's launch-and-trade model, with its flat 1% fee, captured exactly this memecoin flow off Ethereum proper.
- Fee spikes make Ethereum's cost volatility itself a competitive liability against chains courting the same retail trading volume, pressuring wallet and DEX operators to route around mainnet congestion.
Third-order effects
- If the cycle holds, Ethereum's base-layer fee revenue remains structurally hostage to memecoin manias — booming during token-launch waves like H1 2024's, then collapsing to 2020-era lows within months, leaving network security economics dependent on the next speculative burst.
The trend: Ethereum's fee market is oscillating ever more violently around memecoin cycles, with each speculative burst followed by a deeper trough in fees and burn.