Ethereum miners have been seeing their revenues surge so far this month, with the one-day moving average hitting 2,275 ETH thanks to the recent airdrop of Uniswap’s UNI tokens to users who interacted with the protocol.
As CryptoGlobe reported, pending transactions on the Ethereum network surged after Uniswap launched its UNI governance token, and airdropped 400 UNI tokens to every user who interacted with the protocol up until August 31.
Uniswap is a leading decentralized exchange that instead of using an order book uses a model called an Automated Market Maker (AMM). A total of one billion UNI tokens are set to be distributed over the next four years, but users who interact with the protocol were airdropped hundreds of tokens.
This has seen them either quickly move the funds to exchanges to sell their airdropped tokens – as the 400 UNI tokens each user received are worth over $1,000 – and move funds to Uniswap pools that let them add liquidity using UNI, to earn more governance tokens.
The result was a spike in network activity. Etherscan data shows the Ethereum network utilization is near capacity at 97% and, as such, the increase in transactions saw fees go up higher. Data from the same source shows the average transaction fee hit $5.56 as users were moving their funds.
On-chain analytics provider Glassnode reveals that these fees contributed to a rise in ETH miner revenue, helping it hit a 5-year high.
BitInfoCharts data shows that growing miner revenues seemingly attracted more miners onto the Ethereum network, as the cryptocurrency’s hashrate hit its highest level since October 2018, of 254 TH/s.
The price of ETH itself has also been going up, presumably as demand for the cryptocurrency keeps growing. CryptoCompare data shows the cryptocurrency is now testing the $400 mark, and is up over 82% in the last 12 months. Bitcoin, in comparison, went up 6.26% in the same period.
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