Ethereum gas fees are back to skyrocketing.

The gas prices calmed down and fell to about 40 Gwie earlier this month after the Berlin hard fork went live in mid-April, layer 1 solutions like BSC and Solana (SOL) gained traction, and layer 2 solutions like Polygon (MATIC) started to see usage.

Average gas prices are currently 150 gwei, as per Blockchair.

This has the average transaction fees on the network going to $30 after falling under $8 on May 2nd, but we have yet to climb to the late February level of about $43.

The USD rate has been on the spike as the price of Ether made a new all-time high today at $4,175.

However, this has been in line with the second largest network’s growing usage as transaction count exceeds 1.7 million, up from a 2017 peak high of 1.4 million. On May 9th, it reached the height of 1,716,600, only to fall just under 700k today.

Since last month, transaction volume has also been strong, seeing a significant jump last week, from 7.1 million on May 6 to nearly 42 million on May 8. Today, it is back to 3 million ETH.

According to Lex Moskovski of Moskovski Capital, the surge in gas prices has been due to the SHIB token.

“Ethereum gas price is skyrocketing due to TikTok influencers shilling SHIB token in anticipation of a DOGE pump. Currently, the token's contract is the 4th most used right after Uniswap's and Tether's,” he noted.

Interestingly, the Dogecoin knockoff is the token behind Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s $8 billion fortune. Buterin actually received 50% of the SHIB token supply from the token’s developers over the past year.

Shiba Inu is a canine-themed meme token inspired by Dogecoin (DOGE), which is up 30,120% in the last four days and is currently trading at $0.00003054.

And Buterin is its highest holder with 505 billion SHIB, which is now worth more than his $1.3 billion in ETH.

Buterin, however, is in no way related to the cryptocurrency. Moving 50% of the coin’s supply to Buterin was actually the SHIB’s anonymous developers’ decision to remove them from circulation, as shared in the cryptocurrency’s white paper or “woofpaper.”

While the community is cautious and feels Buterin may rug them, “Will he do it? Certainly not. There’s no incentive for him to tarnish his reputation for 200 ETH,” tweeted WARONRUGS back in January.

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