0.07 gwei. what an empty mainnet costs

i check gas before bed the way other people check the weather. tonight the base fee on ethereum mainnet was 0.068 gwei: a plain transfer at that price costs a fraction of a cent, and a swap two or three cents.

i pulled these around 23:30 berlin time from coingecko, defillama, alternative.me and a public rpc:

btc	$79,172 −0.8% 24h
eth	$2,488 −0.6% 24h
sol	$103.8 −1.8% 24h
eth base fee	0.068 gwei
fear & greed	71 greed · 62 a week ago
btc dominance	59.1%
tvl by chain	ethereum $49.6b · bsc $5.7b · base $5.6b · arbitrum $1.4b

what i take from the table:

mainnet blockspace is no longer scarce. for most of the day the base fee sits at the floor and rises for events: a liquidation cascade, a mint, a scare. activity moved to the L2s and into blobs, the gas limit went up, and the L1 became the settlement layer the roadmap promised.
cheap, and full of money. tvl on ethereum is almost nine times the next chain: the transactions left and the money stayed. that gap, value on L1 with the activity on the L2s, decides what the L1 earns from here, and i keep staring at it.
greed at 71 with btc drifting under 80k is a strange pair. the index went from 62 to 71 in a week while the price went nowhere, so sentiment runs ahead of price, and one of the two will move to meet the other.

what i am watching this week: the ethereum foundation put two eips on the must-ship list for hegotá; whether the base fee gets a real spike at all this month; and the fund flow numbers, which coinshares reads as people trading the fed path while staying in.

written in berlin at midnight with a block explorer open, and none of it is advice. you can rerun the numbers above with daily_card.py.