EIP-1559 upgrade has been live for a week now. August 5th, Thursday, EIP-1559, along with four more EIPs, i.e., EIP-3198, EIP-3529, EIP-3541, and EIP-3554 went live with the Ethereum London upgrade. While the upgrade benefitted traders, providing fasters transactions. It threatened miners income by burning the majority of transaction fees and removing its entirety from circulation.
ETH prices hike, miners income stabilizes
With the EIP-1559 upgrade, the blockchain saw numerous changes that in turn stabilized miner income, contrary to the general belief that it might lead to a decline. According to Anand Gomes, the co-founder of Paradigm, Ethereum London hard fork upgrade led to a surge in ETH price, along with influencing institutional investors onto the Ethereum blockchain. While miners were strongly against the upgrade, the stabilization in mining fees seems to have also helped stabilized their income.
Source: Coin Metrics
The burning of additional miners fees did make ETH a deflationary token which has helped it surge post the upgrade. A total of 32123.8 ETH has been burnt until now.
Source: TradingView
Priority fee on NFT add to miners income
Miners are also enjoying priority fee rewards on NFT transactions. 75 percent increase in 7 days period of on-chain transactions transferring NFTs, has given rise to the “priority fees” feature through the EIP-1559 upgrade.
CryptoPunks is one of the most popular NFT series with the largest transaction volume. These Punks were sold on the same day as the Ethereum London upgrade and were sold out within a few minutes. Additionally, the past week has seen CryptoPunk cross the $200,000 sales bracket.
Upon the exceptional sale of these NFTs, ETH gas fees hiked from 100 gwei to 400 gwei, in just an hour. But even with increased gas fees, miners saw a ray of light with the priority fees reward. This would enable users to pay extra transaction fees to miners to process their transactions on a priority basis. Part of this priority fee with then be used to pay the miners as a reward for speeding up the transaction process.
With increased on-chain activity because of high NFT transfers and Defi apps, investors are ready to pay more priority fees combined with other factors, that have resulted in an overall increase in the total income of miners. Since the activation of the Ethereum London Hard fork, traders on the ETH blockchain have paid over 7,000 ETH, converting to more than $22 million in fiat.