If you’re an Ethereum user, you’ve probably noticed that your gas fees have been increasing over the past few months. And if you’re new to Ethereum, you might be wondering why gas fees are even a thing.

In this article, we’ll explain what gas fees are, why they’re necessary, and why they’ve been increasing lately.

What are gas fees?

In order to understand gas fees, we first need to understand a bit about how Ethereum works. Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: programs that can automatically execute actions when certain conditions are met.

For example, let’s say you want to create a contract that will send 1 ETH to your friend every time you get paid. In order to do this, you’ll need to write a program that will execute the following actions:

1. Check if you’ve received any ETH.
2. If you have, send 1 ETH to your friend’s address.

3. Repeat 1 and 2 every time you receive ETH.

This might seem like a simple task, but it’s actually quite complex when you consider all the different ways that things can go wrong. For example, what if your friend’s address changes? Or what if you accidentally send ETH to the wrong address?

To make sure that these kinds of contracts work as intended, every time a contract is executed, it costs a small amount of ETH in gas fees. Gas is basically like fuel for the Ethereum network: it’s what’s used to power transactions and keep things running smoothly.

Why have gas fees been increasing?

There are a few reasons why gas fees have been increasing lately. First of all, Ethereum has been growing in popularity, which means that more and more people are using it for their transactions.

This increased demand has led to higher gas prices.

Secondly, there’s been an increase in the number of complex smart contracts being executed on the Ethereum network. These contracts often require more gas than simple ones, which puts upward pressure on prices.

Finally, there have been some recent changes to the way that gas is priced that have also contributed to higher fees. Specifically, the “base fee” (the amount of ETH charged per unit of gas) has tripled in the past month or so.

What does this mean for users?

In short, it means that users are paying more for their transactions than they were before. For example, let’s say you wanted to send 1 ETH to your friend using a smart contract like the one we described earlier. A month ago, this transaction would have cost around $0.30 in gas fees.

Today, it would cost around $0.90.