Spiking Transactions Is Making Ethereum Face Gas Problems

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As we covered in our previous article, the crypto market has experienced an unusual boom in prices leading to another upward market surge. And just as is always the case, an old friend and foe visits the market again; ethereum’s scaling problems.

Scaling has been one of Ethereum’s biggest concerns over the past couple of years. Congestion on the network is no new expect experience for people who have been on the platform or have been acquainted with it foe quite a while now. Every time there is a boost in numbers of transactions on the network, this issue sticks its neck out.

The real problem is not the congestion of the network, but the effect of the congestion – gas prices have shot up insanely. Prices have gone up as much as five times just between Saturday and today. A similar thing happened to bitcoin last year when transaction prices went up to 16 US Dollars per every transaction, no matter how small the money you were transacting.

However, rumours churning in the mill are that it is nor the crypto market’s boom that has caused this, but a prep by the platform’s engineers to implement new scaling solutions that is causing this.

Two months ago the network saw a huge rise in number of transactions and also more people jumping unto the use decentralized apps that run on the ethereum platform. Moat of these were online gaming platforms. Ethereum’s gas price is a mere 0.01 US dollars. But after 13 million in gas was consumed by these dApps (decentralised Apps), that price doubled. And all of a sudden people run into some sort of panic and frenzy, like omg events to the cryptokotties invasion of December when Ethereum chose to trade in “cute adorable kitties” as crypto valued assets.

There was also a vote on the network to add the Fcoin token to an exchange jay a few days ago and moat people believe it could be a contributing factor to the congestion on the network.

Ethereum gas prices present stand at 0.00004 ETH, doubling from 0.00002 ETH from before last weekend. When we last saw this same thing was in January, getting to the end of the great bull run.

Aa is expected with congestion, is delays. Ethereum has been unusually slow over the past two days i terms of transaction processing. Much longer than you would expect for Ethereum as transactions take even hours just to get a couple of confirmations.

Due to this both gaming and exchange platforms are increasing their gas fees. Blocktrades did it, via a post of theirs which asserted so, and Binance is also playing the same card presently via a twitter post on their official account.

A Reddit user also made a similar claim of increased gas prices

“MY COMPANY WAS PUBLISHING SMALL (64 CHARACTERS) BITS OF DATA TO ETHEREUM, AS AN IRREFUTABLE PUBLICATION CHANNEL. A WORKING GAS PRICE WAS 1 GWEI WHEN WE STARTED. NOW IT’S ~100-200”

But well other people on the other side of the coin say that the willingness of people to pay double for the network shows that it is not dying or losing relevance, but that people are using it; so much that they will pay to continue doing so.

If there’s any bright side where we all can’t disagree, it’s that it will make people much more anticipate the release of Sharding and Casper.