Spark Pool, Ethermine and F2Pool have voted on limits of almost 9,000,000 GAS per block. The three pools have about 60% of Ethereum processing power.

About 50% of Ethereum miners are in favor of the increase in the GAS limit (measure of transaction costs) per block. This is reflected in figures from etherchain.org, as well as in developers’ statements about Ethereum. Among them are those by lead developer Vitalik Buterin.

It can be seen in data from Ether Chain how the main mining pools of Ethereum have supported the proposal. Among those pools, the most prominent are Spark Pool, Ethermine and F2Pool, whose combined processing power is around 60% of that of the network.

According to developer Eric Conner, miners seek to increase the capacity of the network by 25%. He says that the main objective of these mining pools would be to set a limit of 10,000,000 GAS per block, which would also lead to increase in the size of the chain blocks.

It is intended to decongest the network in order to improve the performance in the processing of transactions. Besides, it is sought to improve the interaction between smart contracts that work on the Ethereum chain.

At the time of writing this note, the mining pools mentioned above voted on limits exceeding 8,900,000 GAS.

Since December 2017, the limit has remained around 8,000,000 GAS per block, according to data available in Etherscan. However, that average has reached its highest point in recent days, exceeding 8,200,000 GAS.

In Ethereum, each transaction requires GAS expenditure on processing. This amount of GAS is measured depending on the size of the transaction and is based on Gwei, the minimum fraction of Ether, the network’s native cryptocurrency. At the time of writing this note, the average for a transaction to be included in the next block on the chain is 23 GAS per byte of information.

According to Eth Gas Station data, the average price of GAS in the last mined block was 28 gwei per GAS unit. The highest price ever paid for a transaction in that block was 100 Gwei per GAS. That figure is equivalent to USD 0.29, based on the current price of Ether in the cryptocurrency market.

Concern about Ethereum’s Scalability

Among the Ethereum developers’ main concerns about the future of the network is its scalability. In that regard, for the Istanbul fork, which is expected in October, the reduction on the costs of data transmission during transactions has already been approved.

The proposal, submitted by the StarkWare development team, establishes the decrease from the current average of 60 units of GAS per byte processed to about 16 GAS. This will influence the increase in the size of Ethereum blocks. According to StarkWare, this will not pose a problem for the network, alluding to a study that they conducted on the impact of the proposal.

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has recently expressed concern about the scalability of the platform. He asserted that the network was almost full and that the scalability was currently in a “bottleneck” due to network saturation.

By Willmen Blanco

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here