Cumulative transaction fees paid to Ethereum (ETH) miners for 2020 are now close to double those of Bitcoin (BTC), clocking in at $276 million versus $146 million.

A chart released by Coinmetrics highlights how Ethereum fees went on a steep ascent in the latter part of the year, coinciding quite closely with the release of Compound’s token incentive. Cumulative 2020 fees on Ethereum equalized with Bitcoin’s on Aug. 12, continuing a break-neck ascent since.

Source: Coinmetrics

This
marks a distinct change from trends in transaction fees from past
years, where Bitcoin generally dominated over any other network by a
wide margin. In 2019, Bitcoin came out with a five-to-one advantage in the same comparison.

Cointelegraph previously reported that Ethereum first began posting higher daily fee revenue
in June. As activity increased and the average transaction fee with it,
total revenue began skyrocketing. Between August and September,
Ethereum began breaking previous records and quickly became unusable for some participants.

The culprit is most likely the boom of decentralized finance
and yield farming, though stablecoin transfers and some alleged Ponzi
schemes also make up a significant portion of block space usage on
Ethereum.

The current state of affairs is likely to wind down
somewhat as DeFi euphoria settles, similarly to what happened in the
crypto market at large in 2018.

It’s interesting to note that
Ethereum fee revenue briefly exceeded the block rewards for a few
particularly high-activity days in the past few months. Overall, fees
have crept up to steadily over more than 10% of total issuance since May
— a threshold achieved only a few times in the coin’s history.

Source: Coinmetrics

This may be particularly valuable for ETH holders in light of the EIP-1559 proposal,
which seeks to introduce a fee burn mechanism. While the specifics of
the implementation imply that in periods of high activity there may
still be bidding wars that directly benefit miners, high activity could
lower the effective issuance rate to a significant extent.

For
Bitcoin, raising transaction fees to cover existing issuance is crucial
for its long-term future, since block rewards will eventually expire.
However, the cryptocurrency space in the past two years has begun
trending away from Bitcoin-centric use cases to stablecoins and DeFi. While Bitcoin usage remains high, losing dominance to other blockchains may prove catastrophic for its long-term prospects.