Share this article
Record $166M Ethereum Fees Last Month Were 6 Times Bigger Than Bitcoin's
Ethereum continues to outpace Bitcoin in transaction fees, with DeFi mania helping push total fees to $166 million last month.
By Paddy Baker
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 10:02 a.m. Published Oct 1, 2020, 10:57 a.m.
Ethereum miners earned over six times more in fees compared to those working on Bitcoin in September.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
- Glassnode data shows Ethereum's total transaction fees stood at an all-time high of $166 million for the month – far more than the $26 million taken in Bitcoin fees.
- Ethereum fees long trailed those on Bitcoin, but have been on a tear over the past few months as surging interest in DeFi led to record transaction volumes.
- Fee revenue on Ethereum first outpaced Bitcoin's in June – the same month decentralized lender Compound released its governance token and kick-started the DeFi mania.
- As the DeFi space picked up momentum, the difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin fees has increased from only $10 million in June to well over $70 million by August.
- Thursday's data shows the fee disparity between the two protocols practically doubled to $140 million in September.
- Monthly Ethereum fees were just $1.5 million at the start of 2020.
- This coincides with total value locked (TVL) in DeFi, which first broke the $1 billion in February but surged over the summer to well over $11 billion, according to DeFi Pulse.
- HIVE Blockchain cited DeFi as a major contributing factor when reporting it earned approximately $12 million in fees in the second fiscal quarter, 30% up from Q1.
See also: DeFi Summer; Bitcoin Fall
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
