A year after Ethereum's Dencun upgrade, average gas fee has fallen by 95%

The upgrade, which went live on March 13, 2024, merged two significant upgrades: the Cancun upgrade for Ethereum's execution layer and the Deneb upgrade for its consensus layer.

A year since Ethereum's Dencun upgrade, which aimed at reducing transaction costs and improving scalability, saw the average gas fell by 95%.

The upgrade, which went live on March 13, 2024, merged two significant upgrades: the Cancun upgrade for Ethereum's execution layer and the Deneb upgrade for its consensus layer.

Together they brought nine Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that were focused on reducing transaction costs and improving scalability, especially for layer-2 networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync.

Prior to the upgrade, gas fees were getting out of hand. During 2024, the average Ethereum gas price was about 72 gwei. As of March 12, 2025, it had fallen to a mere 2.7 gwei, according to YCharts. This makes normal transactions significantly less expensive.

For instance, last year, token swapping on Ethereum was costing around $86 in fees, and selling NFTs was costing about $145 in gas due to high gas prices, according to Etherscan. But now, a typical token swap can be completed for nearly $0.39, while selling an NFT costs about $0.65.

Although gas prices have decreased considerably, Ether's (ETH) price has dipped 53% since the upgrade. ETH traded at $4,070 in March 2024, but currently, after a year, stands at about $1,891, as per CoinGecko.

Build on Bitcoin (BOB) co-founder Dominik Harz feels that Ethereum is in trouble. He mentioned how the recent price decline wiped out all the DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) gains since Trump's election.

He further stated that Ethereum has had a tough couple of months, whereas Solana has seen high levels of activity, especially with memecoins.

On the other hand, Ethereum's upcoming big upgrade, Pectra, is already running into issues. The upgrade was released on the Sepolia testnet on March 5, 2025, but developers began encountering errors. Blocks were mined with zero transactions, and error messages kept popping up.

Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden confirmed that they rolled out a patch, yet someone, or something, purposely triggered the same error again, and more issues appeared. The Ethereum team finally managed to stabilize the testnet, and transactions are being processed as expected.