dApp SunFlower Farmers presents first major challenge to Polygon Network
Happy New year of 2022 ! Well in the case of Polygon Network, current fan favorite of the NFTs and dApps world, the new year might have been started off with possibly a “happy problem” of attracting too much traffic and attention.
What is Polygon Network?
Polygon is a secondary scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain, In Polygon’s case, batches of transactions are processed on Polygon’s proprietary POS proof-of-stake blockchain. Such batch processing significantly reduces costs (gas fees), and users only have to pay for a fraction of a single Ethereum transaction, and saves time. Over the past year, Polygon Network has seen tremendous growth and adoption, particularly amongst NFT and dApp Game developers.
Due to the obvious benefits of low-gas fees and faster transaction speed, Polygon Network has since attracted both the well-intentioned dApp developers as well as the not-so-noble hackers and spammers. Overall Polygon Network has managed the roadblocks along the way reasonably well and maintained the confidence of its supporters, that is, until the SunFlower Farmers came and started plowing away !
During the first week of 2022, Polygon Network experienced unprecedented congestion, nearly single-handedly caused by Sunflower Farmers, a game that incentivizes gamers to fiercely compete to farm as many token rewards as possible.
Polygon gas fees jumped from the recent average of 60 Gwei, to more than 8-fold in a matter of days, and now more than 500 Gwei !
As a result, Polygon users have voiced frustrations about congestion issues on social media channels. Sunflower Famers has now become the biggest gas guzzler on the network, consuming an astonishing 42% of all transaction fees on Polygon !
Here is the real source of concern: an estimated 1.1 million transactions, on a single day of Jan 5th 2022, were generated from roughly 330k SunFlower Farmers.
How can a single dApp with merely hundreds of thousand users manage to cause impact of such magnitude, on a network that is arguably the superior solution to Ethereum ? Granted such abnormal bursts of transaction peaks were most likely generated by bots designed to take quick advatange of reaping benefits as early SunFlower adopters, there has to be more concrete answers to address the concerns.
Despite this near 10-fold fee hike, Polygon’s gas fees remain very cheap compared to Ethereum, where a single transaction costs anywhere between $50 to $100 at the moment.
Furthermore, it is crucial to observe that in the face of massive network congestion Polygon has had no downtime, which other competing chains like Solana is unable to claim, and have succumbed to recently. in December 2021, Solana, was frozen for several hours and could not process new blocks due to an oversubscribed IDO launch.
While Polygon core team has remained mum regarding the recent network traffic phenomenon, its supporters (including yours truly) remain optimistic and confident that solutions will be implemented in order to improve sustainibility and scalability, and that challenges like this early on may prove to be largely beneficial in the long run.
