High transaction fee when participating a token sale

Question

I took part in a token sale yesterday and reviewing the transaction information I see this:

Value: 0.2 Ether ($55.38) 
Gas Limit: 82311 Gas Price: 0.000000024 Ether 
Gas Used By Txn: 82310 Actual Tx 
Cost/Fee: 0.00197544 Ether ($0.55) 
Cumulative Gas Used: 124310

Isn't the transaction fee way too high? Here was said that a typical transaction cost would be around 0.001 USD. In my case it was around 50 times that value. And given that I sent 0.2 ETH, the fee was of almost a 1%, a lot. Is this the norm now or my case was an isolated one?

Please, correct me if I'm getting something wrong, but cryptocurrencies are willing to replace the banking system, while SEPA transfers are free, a 1% fee per transaction will make that pretty impossible IMHO.

Thanks for your answers!

Answer 1

Token sale transactions are more complex than average smart contract transactions, as they usually issue tokens, update token sale statistics and redistribute the funds, all in one go. They will use Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) CPU time and blockchain storage more than your normal Ethereum account-to-account transfer.

Thus, participating the token sale will utilize more Ethereum blockchain capacity and the transaction fee is higher.

However, the transaction fee is flat (not %) and will stay same regardless of your transaction amount.

Ethereum transaction fees have rose with the rapid increase of Ethereum value. Ethereum community is working for long term solution to have low transaction fees, but today there is no way around this.