Miners on crypto's second-biggest blockchain had a bumper day Thursday, earning a record $16 million for confirming a growing number of DeFi-related transactions.
- Data collected from Etherscan shows miners collected a total 42,763 ether in transaction fees on Thursday, a new all-time high.
- That's currently worth nearly $16.5 million, according to CoinDesk data.
- That comes as daily volumes on Ethereum surged nearly 400,000 on Thursday to 1.4 million transactions, also smashing the previous 1.34 million record reached in January 2018.
- Activity has skyrocketed in the past year as the hype around decentralized finance, which is mostly built on Ethereum, has reached fever pitch.
- Statistics site DeFi Prime shows monthly volumes for decentralized exchanges, which include Uniswap, Curve and Balancer, surged nearly $4 billion to a total of $16 billion by Sept. 1.
- At the start of the year, combined volumes barely reached $600 million.
- There is currently over $9 billion worth of assets locked in DeFi applications, according to DeFi Pulse, up from approximately $675 million at the start of the year.
- Earlier this week, Tether moved 1 billion worth of USDT – a stablecoin supported on many DeFi applications – from the Tron to the Ethereum ecosystem on behalf of an unnamed exchange, the second such billion-dollar swap in the past month.
- Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino told CoinDesk it was "definitely probable" exchanges wanted more USDT on Ethereum so they can satisfy rising demand coming from the DeFi space.