Effect of the Gas Price Surges on User Activity in the DAOs of the Ethereum Blockchain

BSTRACT Blockchain technology has enabled a thriving emergent ecosystem of tools and communities actively using decentralized systems. However, most blockchain infrastructure (e.g. Ethereum) requires users to pay some fees to execute their desired actions in these novel online services. To which extent an increase in the price of such fees negatively affects user activity? Would significant price surges deter users from using blockchain-enabled online services? In this work, we study the 2020 surge of transaction fee price in the Ethereum network, and analyze how that affected user activities. Our use cases are the blockchain-enabled Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) from the platforms DAOstack and DAOhaus. Thus, we analyzed 5,580 transactions from 7,825 users grouped in 191 DAO communities, using a VAR model with a daily time series of the average fee value and the DAO operations. Our results show just a minor influence of the fee (gas) price and the activity of DAO users. The insensitivity of the activity to the fee price is an anomaly in a supposedly self-regulated market, and we consider this should be tackled in future implementations.