Ethereum [ETH] running at “full capacity” says Parity developer; Vitalik Buterin disagrees

Ever since the CryptoKitties dApp clogged the Ethereum [ETH] blockchain and brought it to a grinding halt, the argument for scaling the network has become louder and louder. Moreover, the network itself is seeing an exodus of value as ICOs on the platform are selling off the funds they raised.

Adding to this, Afri Schoedon, a developer working on the Parity client for Ethereum, recently asked users to “stop deploying dApps to Ethereum”, as it was running at full capacity.

He went on to ask developers to move to other chains such as Ethereum Classic [ETC] or POA Network [POA], a sidechain on the Ethereum network. His reasons for saying so was that these networks were still high on the capacity of transactions they can process. Moreover, they have existing support for infrastructures such as MyCrypto and MetaMask.

A quick look at block’tivity shows that Ethereum is indeed performing at full capacity, with around 68,000 transactions still in the mempool. This is a worrying development to those who have deployed dApps on the Ethereum blockchain.

Vitalik Buterin, one of the creators of the Ethereum blockchain, also offered his opinion towards the matter. He stated:

“Disagree. Most dapps have lots of room to gas-optimize, and even if *you* don’t your dapp running raises gas fees and pressures *others* to gas-optimize. There’s *plenty* of low-value spam on chain. And everyone should be looking into layer-2 solutions.”

Gas functions as Ethereum’s execution fee for every operation made on the network. Its price is usually expressed in Gwei, which translates to about 0.000000001 Ether. This price is decided by miners, who can refuse to process transactions with less than a certain gas price. Recommended gas prices are currently around 10, a far cry from the price being near 60 Gwei during CryptoKitties.

Buterin went on to say:

“There are layer 2’s without data availability tradeoffs or liveness requirements, eg. tx mass-validation via ZK-SNARKs can reduce costs to < 1000 gas per tx if done well. That’s ~500 tx/sec on-chain with all the security guarantees of on-chain.”

Other crypto-enthusiasts pitched in with recommendations for the network to replace ETH. User Ekpethedragon said:

“Codius exists and is currency agnostic, so you don’t have to use XRP if you don’t want to! Why are people so determined to hate what is good for them?”

User Josh, however, was skeptical. He stated:

“It is clear to anyone who objectively looks, that most people heavily invested in Eth were/are sold on promises and ideas, and gave no thought to the execution. The others were tricked, confused, oblivious, lazy, gamblers.”