Rapid falls in asset prices triggered cascading liquidations, incentivising liquidation bots to spend big on gas to clean up the insolvent positions. This was exacerbated by the high underlying gas prices on those days, where many users paid whatever it took to shore up leveraged positions.

The miners were winners, as shown by some of the prices paid by liquidators on May 19th and 23rd:

The market volatility triggered intense competition for Ethereum blockspace, shown in the average gas price chart below:

May 19th and May 23rd were characterised by flash crashes in many crypto assets. See the ETH price on these two days in the charts below:

Drilling into the month of May, we see a couple of large spikes accounting for most of the liquidation gas usage action.

Looking back over time, we see the month of May as an outlier in the historical record. May was a volatile month in the crypto world, with many assets hitting all-time highs before a series of price crashes and slides sent the total crypto market cap down 40% in 11 days. Smaller downturn events in January & February also coincided with large gas usage by liquidator accounts.

In the past 30 days, there was over $4.6m paid in gas fees for liquidation transactions on the Compound Protocol