The Ethereum network is now twice as popular and brought in more fee revenue than Bitcoin yesterday. How long before the price catches up?

Despite a recent 17% upswing in price, the ‘flippening’ still looks a long way off when you examine the market cap of Ether versus Bitcoin.

But when it comes to network use and fee revenue, it’s already happened.

According to data from Messari, at the time of writing the Ethereum network had taken $202,036 over the past 24 hours in transaction fees.

That’s 10.7% more fee revenue than the Bitcoin network, which took $182,530 over the same period.

Ethereum managed the feat, despite the average fee on the network being 24 percent cheaper than Bitcoin’s: 15.6 cents to 20.6 cents.

Ethereum has a long way to grow

Despite the fee revenue, and ongoing dominance in terms of transaction numbers, Ethereum’s market cap is just 12.3% of Bitcoin’s.

The data shows the Bitcoin forks have tumbleweeds blowing through their network revenue, with Bitcoin Cash taking $153.01 and Bitcoin SV taking $126.81.

In fact, Bitcoin and Ethereum are not just the only blockchain networks to hit six figures in 24-hour transaction revenue – they were the only networks to even hit four figures.

The Bitcoin network is currently processing around 364,681 transactions per day, while Ethereum is processing 703410. So the Ethereum network has 192% as much use as Bitcoin.

That’s still a way off the record high around 1.4 million a day.

EOS does 5.7 million but a lot of those are bot spam and the transactions are free anyway.

Ether’s 24-hour trading volume is currently at 57% of Bitcoin’s.

Network gas usage at all-time high

Ethereum’s network is currently at capacity, with gas use surging this week to an all-time high.

That’s partly thanks to the ‘other’ flippening – the ongoing transfer of the bulk of Tether use from Omni (on the Bitcoin network) to ERC-20.

Tether’s Ethereum network usage has increased 1000% since July and now accounts for around a quarter to a third of the entire network.

However, a gambling DApp called Fair Win also uses a fair chunk of the network – even more than Tether in the past 24 hours.

DApps (and DeFi) are of course one of the big reasons for the Ethereum network’s popularity – it has more developers working on it, and an order of magnitude more DApps than most other networks.

Raising the effective block size of Ethereum

The mining pools are divided on raising the gas limit, but it’s been increased twice in the past couple of day from 8 million up to 8.4 million.

The hope is there will be agreement to increase it up to 10 million, which would bring Ethereum’s effective block size every ten minutes up from 800KB to 1MB.

That’s still smaller than Bitcoin’s effective block size, thanks to SegWit, of up to 2MB.

The comeback kid

The price of Ether has increased by more than 17% over the past week and social media interest in Ether has been noticeably higher according to The Tie.

Open Interest on Bitmex has increased two thirds in the past seven days.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said recently that Ethereum 2.0 – the proposed solution that will enable Ethereum to scale much greater than Bitcoin – is looking promising.

“[First stage of Ethereum 2.0 is] finalized except for things that come up during the security audits. The clients are now talking to each other. The next step is to make sure they can maintain a public network at scale,” he said.

Ethereum 2.0 is due to be unveiled next year.