I'm the type of person that links to know how things change over time and the cost of "Gas" for ethereum has recently sparked my interest. "Gas" refers to the fee required to conduct transactions or execute contracts on the ethereum blockchain. This price is determined by the ethereum miners, who can chose to decline a transaction if the gas price is too low. The measurement used is "gwei", which is a subunit of ether similar to satoshi for bitcoin. What I want to do is take a look at the history of ethereum gas prices through the past years. 

This chart shows the gas prices in Gwei for the past 5 years.

The highest average price, occurring on 12/8/2016 of 939.6 Gwei. The highest average price we've seen in the past year was on 6/11/2020 for 709.7 Gwei. 

This chart shows the average prices for the previous 5 months. The highest again of 709.7 Gwei occurred on 6/11/2020 and we saw a peak just 12 days ago with 538 Gwei. 

Here is a look at the daily transaction total for the past 5 months, that correlates with the gas prices mentioned above. The number of daily transactions has stayed above 1000K since July 30 (with the exception of 1 day in September, when it dipped down to 950K). 

The average gas price in Gwei for September 2020 is 164.3 Gwei

The average gas price in Gwei for September 2019 was 17.2 Gwei 

The average gas price in Gwei for September 2018 was 12.2 Gwei

In 2 years, the average gas prices have increased 1264.72%. This fact just magnifies the increasing popularity of the etherum blockchain, most likely driven from the DeFi boom.