Binance is accused of intentionally raising Ethereum gas fees. Data analysis tells you what happened

Although Ethereum 2.0 is getting closer and Layer2 solutions are being born, Ethereum transaction gas fees are still high, and users often need to spend dozens of dollars to complete transactions within a few minutes. In this case, public chains such as Binance BSC have become the choice of many DeFi users, and many projects have turned to BSC public chains for development. Recently, the prices of multiple ecological currencies including BNB have exploded.

However, in the past few days, more and more voices in the crypto industry have pointed out that Binance is likely to be one of the driving forces behind the high gas fees of Ethereum, in order to encourage more users to move to BSC for transactions, lending and other operations.

On February 18, Twitter blogger @BulloTaurus tweeted that after conducting extensive research, he found that Binance is one of the main spenders of Ethereum gas fees, and 6 of the top 10 addresses are marked as Binance.

BulloTaurus also questioned in the comments, why does Binance use 270 Gwei for withdrawals when the average Gwei is 150? Why does Binance pay users 50% more in fees to save a few seconds of transaction confirmation time?

Chain Catcher checked the above situation on the Etherscan browser at 4 pm on February 20 and found that among the top 10 Ethereum gas spending addresses in the last 24 hours, 5 addresses still belonged to Binance, spending a total of 560.8 ETH, which is much higher than other exchanges.

One possible reason is that Binance’s trading volume and number of users have continued to rise recently, and the number of user withdrawals has also increased significantly, so the total gas expenditure is significantly higher.

However, after Chain Catcher compared the specific transfer records of Binance and other exchanges such as Huobi, it was found that the above reasons could not fully explain why Binance had to pay huge gas fees, because Binance’s average single ERC20 token transaction Gas was still significantly higher.

In order to better compare the average gas expenditures of multiple exchanges, Chain Catcher collected statistics on the ERC20 transfer records of Binance, Huobi, FTX, Crypto.com and other exchanges between Ethereum blocks 11892460 and 11892480. During this period, Binance's two addresses made a total of 85 transfer transactions with an average gas fee of 0.014 ETH. The average gas fees of Huobi, FTX and other exchanges were around 0.009 ETH, that is, Binance's ERC20 token transfer transaction gas fee was 55.5% higher than the average level of other exchanges.

Comparison of average gas fees of major exchanges

Huobi address transaction records

Transaction records of FTX addresses

Transaction records of Binance addresses

Through the above analysis, it can be basically concluded that Binance is paying a gas fee that is significantly higher than the market average for withdrawal transactions. In addition, the number of transactions is quite large, which objectively aggravates the congestion of the Ethereum network. This is one of the main behind-the-scenes factors causing Ethereum's gas fee to remain high.

Perhaps Binance can explain that the purpose is to create a faster withdrawal experience for users, but at a time when Binance is fully supporting the development of the BSC public chain, it is hard not to suspect that it is intentionally raising the Ethereum network Gas fee, raising the threshold for ordinary users to participate in the Ethereum ecosystem, and thereby attracting users to the BSC public chain to participate in various DeFi ecosystems.

In fact, similar speculations have been widely discussed on social media such as Twitter and WeChat. On the evening of February 19, a series of WeChat group chat records were circulated. The content showed that a user @Vitalik asked whether the congestion of ETH during this period was caused by Binance's high gas charges and withdrawals. Vitalik replied, "Haha, I know that the first batch of rollups supporting EVM may be launched next month, which will reduce transaction fees by 100 times."

Perhaps seeing a lot of doubts, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng also tweeted today to express his support for ETH. "Binance Pool is now the 11th largest ETH mining pool. We still strongly support ETH." Zhao Changpeng said.

In response to these questions, Binance also gave a specific response to Chain Catcher, saying, "Due to the withdrawal mechanism of the ETH wallet, if a transaction is delayed due to insufficient GAS fees, the subsequent withdrawal queue will not be able to execute. In order to ensure smooth withdrawals from the ETH wallet of the entire platform, we temporarily adjusted the GAS fee to 300 last night, and it has now been adjusted back to normal levels."

However, according to Chain Catcher's query, the average gas fee for transfers from Binance addresses is still significantly higher than that of other exchanges. On social media, doubts about Binance are still fermenting and spreading, and Chain Catcher will continue to pay attention.

Original link: https://www.chainbs.com/article/2059310