Ethereum congestion continues to increase, who can overtake in a corner?
Editor's Note: This article comes fromCointelegraph Chinese (ID: CointelegraphChina), Author: Alex, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
Cointelegraph Chinese (ID: CointelegraphChina)
Cointelegraph Chinese (ID: CointelegraphChina)
, Author: Alex, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
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Ethereum's Congestion Dilemma
At the same time, in June this year, the community voted and passed the proposal to increase the Gas Limit by 25%, which increased the network throughput from 35 transactions per second to about 44 transactions. However, due to the increase in demand for transfers, the Gas Usage (Gas Used/Gas Limit) is still increasing. The current usage rate has reached 97%, which is only 3% away from the upper limit.
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Data source: Etherscan, drawing: Cointelegraph Chinese
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Data source: ethgasstation.info, drawing: Cointelegraph Chinese
Based on the transaction fee of the entire network in the same period, the author also calculated the proportion of the transaction fee of each contract. As shown in the figure, in the past 30 days, 15 contracts contributed a total of 79,048 ETH/US$31.73 million in handling fees, which is equivalent to 31% of the overall handling fees of Ethereum. Uniswap and USDT alone contributed 12%/US$12.3 million and 10%/$10.1 million. From this perspective, the current applications on Ethereum have a certain head effect, and are mainly financial.
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Competition on the public chain track
It seems that we have to go back to 2018 when the public chain track was really surging. At that time, there were many narratives such as "better Ethereum", and the keywords included TPS, expansion, consensus mechanism and so on. Today, similar problems with Ethereum still exist, but some public chains have been well developed. If you want to find a platform with faster transaction speed and lower cost than Ethereum and Bitcoin, there are actually many alternatives. The stable currency USDT is the best example. Currently, the networks that support its transfer transactions include: Bitcoin Omni, Ethereum, Tron, EOS, Algorand, Liquid, BCH and OMG Network, among which the version of USDT on Tron benefits from the low With zero handling fees and the support of major trading platforms, the scale has reached 2.88 billion US dollars, accounting for 28% of the total, and the number of transfers is comparable to that of Ethereum.
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Source: Tokenview
Players on the Layer2 track
Similarly, whenever Ethereum enters a congestion dilemma, there will be endless talk about Layer 2 (second-layer solutions). Recently, some DeFi platforms such as Uniswap and Compound have revealed the idea of transferring to the Layer 2 network, and Vitalik has also made similar suggestions. According to the combing of public information, Layer 2 technologies are currently divided into six types: State Channel, Sidechain, Plasma, ZK Rollup, Optimistic Rollup, and Validium.
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Drawing: Cointelegraph Chinese
State Channel: Inspired by Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, it is a technical solution to achieve expansion through off-chain transactions, which has better performance and usability. Representative projects: Celer Network and Raiden Network.
Sidechain: A blockchain that is independent of the main chain, has its own validators and operators, and can transfer assets to and from the main chain. Representative projects: Skale Network and POA Network.
Optimistic Rollup: It is also a branch based on Plasma, which uses a similar rollup technology to increase network throughput by calculating status updates, and is slightly less secure than ZK Rollup. Representative projects: Optimism and Unipig.
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Validium: Very similar to zkRollup, the only difference is that data availability in zkRollup exists on-chain, while Validium makes it off-chain. Validium performs optimally in terms of performance, but at the expense of certain security. Represents the project StarkEx.
