The basic gas cost of the Ethereum network is currently hovering between 1 and 2 gwei, while the daily amount of ETH destroyed has dropped to the lowest level this year.

According to The Block, while gas fees remained low, only 210 ETH was destroyed on Saturday, setting a record low for the year. In contrast, when the Gas fee climbed to 100 gwei on August 5th due to severe market fluctuations, the daily destruction amount also skyrocketed to 5000 ETH.

Due to the extremely low level of gas fees, the inflation rate of the Ethereum network has also increased as a result. According to data from The Block, although Ethereum destroyed 210 ETH on the same day, the net ETH issuance exceeded 2000 ETH.

Meanwhile, the inflation rate of the Ethereum network has also risen to 0.586% in the past week.

The decrease in gas costs is mainly attributed to the migration of a large number of user activities to the Layer 2 scaling solution, as well as the introduction of blob transactions in the March Cancun upgrade, which helped reduce the cost of the Layer 2 network.

In response to this inflationary trend, Martin K ö ppelmann, founder of Gnosis, suggests temporarily increasing the gas limit. He pointed out that:

The basic cost is at a low point in many years, about 0.8 GWEI. It needs to reach 23.9 GWEI to offset the staking reward. In my opinion, Ethereum needs to re increase the activity of the underlying chain, and even at such low rates, increasing the gas limit can be a strategy

The London hard fork (EIP-1559) implemented in August 2021 introduced a "basic fee" that would be burned and a "tip priority fee" paid to validators for Ethereum. The basic fees are directly related to online activities, and an increase in fees will result in more ETH being destroyed, thereby reducing supply.