The number of transactions with the world’s second largest cryptocurrency Ethereum has once again crossed the one million per day threshold. The event reminds many of a similar scenario that happened in December 2017. While it is indeed excellent news, some reports suspect much wastage of Ethereum gas.
Binance Responsible for the Spike in Transactions
Ethereum transactions saw a sudden increase of 200,000 operations on May 4, 2018, as a result of unknown reasons. Similarly, at the end of 2017, transactions along the network saw a sudden spike of over 150,000 in just a few days.
According to etherscan data, the last time transactions crossed over 1 million per day was on February 1, 2018. In March and April, the number fluctuated between 500,000 to 750,000. However, what caused the sudden spike as of late is a bit of a mystery.
However, a Twitter user pointed to Binance as the culprit and explained that the exchange had been “doing a very bad job of sweeping: wasting gas, DOSing network, and leaving 0.005 in all accounts.”
https://twitter.com/epheph/status/992467261830057984?s=19
The user also shared a link, showing proof that the Binance Wallet was performing multiple transactions in a minute, wasting gas. He also shared an image via tweet highlighting that one address is accounting for 50 percent of all transactions. The address belongs to Binance, which accounted for half of the gas used on May 4, 2018.
The more the gas wasted means, the higher the fees on the network. However, the following day the transactions went back to normal and left the network only temporarily strained.
Temporarily Straining the Ethereum Network
Ethereum gas is the life of Ethereum network. Gas is the unit by which calculates the amount of computational effort required to complete operations on the network. Otherly, Ethereum gas is how the network estimates how much fees are to be paid for transactions, smart contracts or ICO’s.
In related news, an Ethereum developer Péter Szilágyi responded on Reddit to an individual pointing that Ethereum Geth is not running smoothly, Szilágyi stated:
“What you are experiencing is not Geth getting worse, but the Ethereum Sidechain pushing the limits of what the existing codebase can handle. Two years ago the Olympic Ethereum network fell apart multiple times, and clients could not keep up syncing [that] was 8GB in size; current Ethereum mainnet is 1TB for an archive node.”
In comparison, as per Blockchain.info, Bitcoin transactions per day amount to 185,312, which indicates that Ethereum processes five times more transactions per day than Bitcoin.