Ethereum London Upgrade Sparks 9% Increase in Chain Capacity
After Ethereum's anticipated upgrades went live earlier this month, the average activity on the platform measured using the daily gas usage has increased by an estimated 9%.
Data from Etherscan’s historical average daily gas used chart shows that the 9% jump in consumption occurred after the August 5 launch of Ethereum's London upgrade.
The last significant gas rise dates back to approximately 4 months ago, when daily gas usage spiked 8 billion more to settle above 100 billion on Etherscan’s chart. Increase in gas usage amount is a pointer towards an increase in the traffic the platform can handle.
Why Has The Network Capacity Risen?
Earlier yesterday, Ethereum's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, posted a detailed analysis on Reddit outlining possible causes for notable increase in chain capacity.
According to Buterin's explanation, the London upgrade put the nascent beginning of Ethereum Ice Age on hold, causing a delay. This also implies that average block times for miners have returned to their long-run normal level of about 13.1 seconds.
Buterin insinuates that the EIP-3554 upgrade, which was intended to delay the network difficulty bomb, was always going to cause an increase in the complexity of the puzzles of the network's mining algorithm. EIP-3554 bomb delay, however, allows for a consistent mining time to be reached.
Approximately every 13 seconds a miner finds a block, and even as they begin to solve these problems more quickly or slower than this, the algorithm automatically alters the difficulty of the problem. This causes the solution time to go back to the initial 13 seconds.
Vitalik's second reason for the increase in network capacity was the presence of more unused block space prior to the upgrade. The maximum gas used setting then was placed at 15 million, but a significant percentage of the target block remains unused, amounting to large unused gas.
The last thing Buterin pointed out was that the EIP-1559 formula is not entirely perfect in targeting 50% of the base fee to be burned, due to general complexities between block size and fee calculations.
As a matter of fact, according to the co-founder, average blocks are now a little more full (more than 50%) than they were before the upgrade, another reason counting for increased capacity.
Gas Fees Surge Despite London Upgrade
Ethereum network users are currently displeased with the surge in gas prices due to the launch of CyberKongz on NFT on August 15.
Comments by users on Vitalik Buterin's Reddit post discussed how the gas rates seemed to have doubled, a view Buterin quickly checked. BitInfoCharts show that the average transaction fee is almost $25 with users paying up to $40 to swap tokens, and even more for complex smart contract operations.
However, Buterin did end his analysis by saying, for now, users can "rejoice" in the unintended 9% increase in capacity brought on by the London hardfork.
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