After many years of dealing with unscalable blockchain technology, there are many blockchain projects who have had enough of waiting around. They are building their own blockchains, using third-party scaling solutions, or even migrating over to new blockchains.
What is Ethereum Network Congestion?
There have been 100’s of Ethereum projects over the last couple of years that have experienced frustration when the wider network is gaining adoption. Adoption is great for Ethereum, as this means lots of people are using decentralised dapps, using exchanges and making transactions. However, as side effect of this is Pending Transactions go up and the Gas Price to get a transaction processed by the network also goes up. When gas prices go up, Projects can’t afford to keep their applications running because the cost to do a transaction is so high.
What Ethereum Projects Have Been Affected by Network Congestion?
Most notibly, if you have been an avid believer of Blockchain technology and Decentralisation, you would have heard of the Dapp called CryptoKitties. It was a game that caused much hysteria, where people could breed different kitties so the offspring would have different faces, features and backgrounds. Each kitty was unique and verifiable by blockchain, with the pinnacle of someone purchasing a cat called “Dragon” for 600 ETH or $170,000 USD.
On December the 10th, 2017 the CryptoKitties cat marketplace accounted for almost 15% of Ethereum’s total network transactions. This led to gas prices spikes and blown out pending transactions, even ICO’s had to cancel! This mass hysteria brought Crypto to a lot of mainstream media, however also highlighted scalability weaknesses of Ethereum.
Projects Can’t Afford to Wait Around as Gas Prices Surge
More recently on March 12th, 2020 there was an Ethereum Price Crash, with it’s price experience dropping a record-braking 33% ($200 to $129). With over a billion dollars of exchange transactions occurring, the network couldn’t handle it, spiking the gas price per transaction up above $0.30.
The MakerDAO is a decentralised lending platform based off automated Ethereum Smart Contracts. It experienced it’s “Black Thursday” event on March 12th and 13th, where the MakerDAO oracles could not receive a price update for a long time due to congestion and increased gas prices. This delay created opportunities for near zero bids to be liquefied , with the MakerDAO platform losing 5.67 million DAI and $8.32 million being taken.
There is a High TPS low fee solution… it’s in MainNet Beta Now!
Ethereum dapps will continue to push on. From a customer perspective, they may experience their dapp slowing down, the odd error or time out and may have to pay higher fees occasionally. This is not ideal and there are many of the world’s smartest blockchain engineers trying to solve the issue.
However, according to Solana’s CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, some of these efforts may be in vain. Sharding essentially builds multiple slow chains and also multiplies the complexity and decreases network transaction throughput. Watch the full video below!
What Ethereum Projects are Exploring the Solana Blockchain?
Chainlink has over 20 decentralised Ethereum price oracles that act as an aggregated trust source for Decentralised Finance (DeFi) applications along with many Cryptocurrency Exchanges and price charts.
The partnership between Chainlink and Solana is to build a crazy fast price oracle that can update every 400 milliseconds. When this oracle is built, the results will speak for itself when compared to the slower Ethereum oracles that are subject to congestion, high gas prices and either expensive or failing price updates.
Got the next blockchain application that needs to massively scale?
Feel free to start building with the Solana code, get assistance via the Solana Accelerator or reach out to the team at Solana.
