Why will NFTs on ETH soon become a thing of the past?

LolSon
5 min readAug 3, 2021

Hi everybody. Today I want to talk about the fact that NFTs on Ethereum is just one big and global mistake. What makes me think that? The reason is extremely simple: Fees on the Ethereum network simply do not meet the needs of most users.

Let’s just take a look at the TOP Ethereum Gas consumers. To do this, I will use the GasTracker from Etherscan.

https://etherscan.io/gastracker

As we can see, one of the largest consumers of Ethereum Gas is the OpenSea NFT marketplace, where you can purchase or create NFTs. This is a very large project that sells a large amount of art pieces , sometimes for fabulous money!

As we can see from the data, $831,530.25 was spent on fees by Opensea users. What? Don’t you find it strange that you give away a million dollars every 24 hours just by buying an NFT? What kind of nonsense is this?

As they say, an artist should be hungry, but should he be hungry because of an old and expensive technology? If you don’t believe that this is a lot, let’s just look at random transactions in OpenSea.

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x35b9ac277ed31c8a111fbdca6cf9fc0ef32e668c3abd3b48eef48a69e34eff71

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x768bb7a660548b8f0be206b4202819e7bb598c9868be802f3d54c5708e04c62c

https://etherscan.io/tx/0x47620183902e542ff84a3e2b90bad2cbb9d1b022338e33a06b1db2b4c6a4df0f

I took these transactions by random.

The average cost of fees was $18. Yes, yes, tell me now about the times when transactions cost you 5–6 dollars per transaction on the Ethereum network. But when demand gets high, Swaps and NFTs have never seen such transactions. Now there is a (comparatively) small demand but do you remember the times when gas was 500–1000 or should I remind you?

I remember my face when I wanted to buy an NFT at Gwei 300. I thought “LOL NFT costs $ 100 but I have to pay another $ 150 to get this”. I didn’t take this deal.

The whole trouble is that if you do not have more than 20–30 thousand dollars for trading per month, then you simply close the path to NFT on ETH. You will simply be ruined by transactions.

I remember in October 2020, my partner and I spent more than 2 thousand dollars on gas fees that month, earning a little more than 6 thousand at the same time… In other words, we spent 33% of our profit on fees.

Therefore, I oppose NFTs on ETH! I understand that there are people who believe in ETH 2.0, but it will take another 3–4 years. Are you ready to wait? I’m not. So let’s take an alternative.

I don’t want to take popular and well-regulated blockchains of the BSC type. Let’s take something independent. I recently started using the EVM Aurora from Near Protocol. I think it makes sense to consider NFT on their blockchain.

I heard that they have a project https://paras.id/ where you can buy NFTs for NEAR. This is not a review of the project and no, this is not an advertisement. I just want to compare prices and fees. Just take a look!

And so, on Opensea, there are now an average of 45 thousand transactions per day. As I said, the average cost is $18.

45k* $ 18=$822,420

It all fits.

Let’s see how much users pay paras.id. Near is one of the cheapest and fastest blockchains, I’m not saying this for advertising purposes but, this is the truth. The transaction takes an average of 1 minute, and the fee is less than one cent.

I found a Paras contract in NEAR Explorer

https://explorer.near.org/accounts/contract.paras.near

Let’s take a look at the average transaction cost. Let’s take as ETH, three random addresses.

https://explorer.near.org/transactions/AwAUuypRoFRVkj2M7QkeXFrVUnYpZ5Q2KyJezc1LNExd

https://explorer.near.org/transactions/8Vs3JJ89A2HVmaAHCfWRwEkFpMqmmvcM6tG4Tx8HBjdv

https://explorer.near.org/transactions/BFmPzwoNFVuFAZktJLkKkH1NrbrtBQrEZwMsJ5X8xR1H

As we can see, the average transaction cost is 0.00206 NEAR. Which at the current exchange rate (2.36) is equal to 0.0049 dollars. No, I was not mistaken! Is less than one cent! Now go and buy NFTs on ETH and pay a thousand times more.

Let’s go even further!

We have an average number of transactions per day on OpenSea, let me remind you, this is 45k. In ETH, users paid more than 800 thousand dollars for 45 thousand transactions.

Let’s apply arithmetic and calculate the cost of these transactions on NEAR.

45к*0.0049$=220$

Two hundred and twenty fucking dollars for 45 thousand transactions. Are you in shock? I am, yes. Can you imagine 800 thousand dollars and 220 dollars. That’s why ETH is shit.

Conclusion

If you don’t have much money, but you still want to trade or issue NFT, use other blockchains. You can use BSC (although I don’t approve of it), TRON or NEAR. It doesn’t matter! Just stop using the old Ethereum!

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