Ethereum is going through a bit of a scaling crisis right now – at a critical time when the world’s most complex dapp is launching ontop of Ethereum’s mainnet.
Augur’s platform launched today, and while it’s been generating hype from the crypto community, I think there’s a bigger issue that most people are missing.
Today, Ethereum blocks have a limit of 8,000,000 gas/block. Gas of course being the fuel to run Ethereum network computations. There are also about 5,800 blocks per day being mined. So that leaves us with a daily gas limit of somewhere around 46 billion.
Lately, Ethereum blocks have been at capacity and Augur’s launch is another catalyst that could create trouble for Ethereum’s network. Transaction fees have already been hitting record highs last week, and we’re in the midst of a bear market, imagine the chaos that would ensue if another bull market comes our way. There was actually $2.7 million in transaction fees spent on July 2nd, that’s over 5,800 Ether spent just to verify transactions.
So Augur could cause some serious problems, and I think people are underestimating the complexity of Augur’s platform. Augur is an application that uses ridiculous amounts of gas. Most simple Ethereum transactions use 21,000 gas – if I send Ether to you or you send some to me. But dApps require way more gas as their code is more complex and costly to run.
According to Augur’s GitHub it costs 3 million gas to create a prediction market, and over half a million gas to either create or fill an order. So you could practically fill up an entire Ethereum block by spending 8,000,000 gas on creating 2 markets and filling a couple orders for predictions. In contrast, most Ethereum blocks today contain around 100 transactions.
Will Augur break the Ethereum network? Only time will tell.
#augur #reptoken #augurlaunch
