tl;dr: It's NFTs. It's always NFTs

So it's that time again, gas fees spiked, what's going on? 10 threads pop up with screenshots asking what's up, that's unacceptable, etc etc. I figured I'd take this oppportunity to explain how to figure it out for yourself next time this happens

First step is to ask yourself what happened the last 50 times the base fee spiked like that. The answer is usually "NFT dropped"

Then go to https://ultrasound.money/ on the 1H leaderboard and notice that the usual suspects (OpenSea, Uniswap, etc.) have been bumped off their usual spots on the leaderboard by random addresses and weird names like "Afro Droids"

Look up afro droids on google, and sure enough it's an NFT thing that just dropped an hour ago. When these things launch, it's first come first serve. Like a black friday sale. It doesn't matter if you'll pay $100 in gas fees when you might be able to sell it for outrageous amount like 420 ETH a week later.

Then you can click on the other hex addresses to see them on etherscan, one of them has the name "CleverGirls" and is an ERC721 so another NFT thing [that just launched today](blob:https://imgur.com/5ba7331d-5bd7-42d5-84d8-41e3b2bb0574)

Why not another? 0x3eff964d... points to something called BeatnikTikTribe which of course is yet another NFT drop