By Ramani Ramachandran and Rohit Alluri

The Ethereum blockchain is experiencing a surge in traffic as the network fees reached a new high in 2017, increasing from over 11c to 39c since Sep 1st. In response, the ETH dev community has responded by increasing the gas limit by 25% to 10M gas per block to accommodate more number of transactions in a block. The move follows considerable upticks in Ethereum network usage, largely due to stablecoin Tether (USDT), which has shifted its reliance from Bitcoin via the Omni Layer to the Ethereum blockchain.

According to research data from monitoring resource Coin Metrics, as of Sept. 15, Ethereum users paid almost as much in daily transaction fees as Bitcoin users: $182,899 versus $185,993, respectively.

Ethereum Locked in DeFi

MakerDAO still accounts for a lion’s share of ETH locked up in collateral, with more than 1.41 million of ETH locked up. Compound showed a strong w/w decline of 14% in ETH locked up, while Augur improved by 4%.

Lightning Network Growth

Capacity per channel fell by 0.7% w/w. The total number of nodes increased w/w by 1%, and the total number of channels decreased by 1% w/w.

DEX Tracker:

Trading volumes on DEXs have increased on a w/w basis, with the average daily trading volume averaging 35k ETH for this week. IDEX remains the biggest DEX in terms of trading volume and DAI is the highest traded cryptocurrency on DEXs.

Source: dex.watch

Crypto Loans Tracker:

Compound Loans:

Total loans issued on Compound for the last week stands at approx. $5.7 million for the week, a strong increase from $2.6 million in the previous week. WETH is the most borrowed cryptocurrency on Compound followed by DAI and BAT.

dYdX Loans:

Total loans issued on dYdX for the last week stands at approx. $5.6M for the week, a 50% increase from $2.7M last week. DAI is the most borrowed cryptocurrency on Compound followed by WETH and USDC.

MakerDAO Loans:

DAI loans issued on MakerDAO for this week stand at ~$8.8M, a 4x increase from $2.1M last week. The total outstanding DAI debt currently stands at ~$86 million.

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