Expensive fees in the crypto market, particularly on Ethereum, have surged due to high network activity. Gas prices on Ethereum soared past 23 gwei on Monday, adding significant costs for traders. For example, the average cost of an NFT transaction on Ethereum reached over $372.29 at times. This implies that users who were exchanging profile pictures with friends for free would have to spend hundreds of dollars to complete those transactions. The cost of swapping tokens on Ethereum reached nearly $220 per transaction at various times on Monday. The extremely high fees make some crypto transactions not worth it, as the costs could outweigh any potential profits. At times on Monday, borrowing on Ethereum cost over $186 per transaction, with bridging funds to another blockchain costing over $70 on average to avoid these high prices. In the past day, the protocol with the highest gas usage on Ethereum has been Uniswap, which is used for trading ERC-20 tokens. In the past day, more than $4.2 million worth of ETH has been destroyed while carrying out transactions on the platform. The increase in high on-chain fees coincides with the rising values of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, as well as on-chain assets like NFTs. On Monday morning, ETH reached $3,500 for the first time this year. A CryptoPunks NFT on the Ethereum blockchain was recently sold for $16.03 million in ETH, making it the second-highest price ever for a piece in this popular collection. The surge in gas fees coincides with the upcoming Dencun upgrade on Ethereum, which is expected to dramatically lower transaction costs on layer-2 scaling networks through a new data storage method known as proto-danksharding. Developers believe that Dencun will greatly reduce gas fees in the Ethereum ecosystem to the point where they may become irrelevant. Polygon Labs VP of Product David Silverman predicts that most users will soon no longer have to deal with gas fees as it becomes a thing of the past. Andrew Hayward made edits to this text. Keep informed about cryptocurrency news by receiving daily email updates.