Why the battle for low or no transaction fees really matters

During the frenzied bull run, transaction fees were running rampant. Over on the Ethereum blockchain, they hit eye-watering highs of $196.638 back in May — rendering the network unusable for most everyday consumers.

The Bitcoin blockchain suffered from a similar issue the year before, accelerating to a record-breaking $300.331. When demand is high, it’s easy for Proof-of-Work networks to get congested — prompting miners to prioritize the transactions with the highest fees.

Here’s the problem: high fees undercut one of crypto’s most potent use cases — a decentralized way of offering peer-to-peer transfers. If sending funds from A to B is impractically expensive, millions of would-be users aren’t going to leverage this technology.

Heavyweights in the crypto sector know this. Over the summer, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned that the cost of single transactions “potentially takes up people’s entire daily income” — especially in developing economies.

Prior to The Merge, Ethereum transactions typically cost between $1 and $20 — and he argued that this simply isn’t good enough for billions of people around the world. Typical daily take home pay stands at $16 in Mongolia, and $4 in Zambia.

Bear markets switch focus from growth to operational improvements — and now, blockchain developers are making a concerted effort to bring costs down. This can help crypto achieve its full potential — especially in vital use cases such as remittances.

Some of the solutions that have been put forward recently include rollups, which bundle transactions together and settle them outside of a Layer 1 network. Not only is this less expensive, but it can also be faster — with data sent back to the mainnet later on.

And just like trying to shove even more clothes into a suitcase, much more emphasis is now being placed on data compression too — ensuring that each transaction takes up a lot less space. This, when coupled with concepts such as sharding, are incredibly encouraging.

But trading platforms — which play a crucial role in interacting with crypto enthusiasts directly — also have a role to play here. Facilitating zero-fee transfers can help deliver an experience all consumers deserve, one where they can move their digital assets without giving a single thought as to how much it will cost.

Making things intuitive

HitBTC is one of the exchanges that is driving forward transactions that incur zero fees. The trading platform offers an intuitive,…