Ethereum Gas Usage Reaches All Time High

The ethereum network has never been more in demand with one key metric, daily gas usage, now standing at an all time high of nearly 52 billion gas units (pictured above).

That’s after miners increased the block gas limit from 8 million to nearly 9.4 million with a target of 10 million.

That has lowered fees a bit to less than 10 cent, but a gambling smart contract is now taking 57% of all network capacity.

The seemingly popular ponzi like game might be gaining traction in Asia where due to language and cultural differences they sort of have a crypto universe of their own.

How long this “game” will continue to appeal remains to be seen with its smart contract based nature leading to far higher demand for gas capacity than simple eth transactions.

The total number of transactions, therefore, has not increased with ethereum still remaining somewhat limited in capacity as there is simply more demand than it currently can handle.

The number of pending transactions, therefore, hasn’t moved much from 100,000 even as capacity is increased slightly.

This situation may well continue for at least another year with it unclear why certain gamification smart contracts are not using snarks based second layers.

The reason is probably because developers do not quite yet have the plug and play tools, with this capacity constrain potentially leading to a refinement of such second layers.

Fees however are still pretty low, but that’s at a fairly low price for eth. If it has a mini-bull run, congestion may well lead some to look at alternatives, but miners have shown themselves to be responsible.

It is unlikely, therefore, the situation would be similar to bitcoin where capacity was intentionally constrained for the medium to the long term.

Instead in eth it’s just a temporary situation until sharding launches in over a year. Thus with the Istanbul release perhaps later this autumn, there may be room for further capacity if fees rise considerably.

The situation so being the continuation of satisfactory conditions for a few months until proper full on scaling launches to give plenty of capacity for the foreseeable future.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com