Analyzing ETH’s Recent Gas Rate Increase
By bloXroute Labs Co-Founder & Chief Architect Aleksandar Kuzmanovic
Recently the total gas used on the Ethereum blockchain reached a new all-time high after Ethereum miners voted to increase the block gas limit by 25% (from 10,000,000 to 12,500,000). bloXroute is connected to many ETH pools and services, which gives us a unique vantage point on what’s happening in the Ethereum network. We wanted to share some of our insights, the most important of which is that our data implies that the recent gas limit increase is modest, and that a much higher gas limit can be safely deployed.
Demand Remains High
The increase of the block gas limit by 25% has, in theory, allowed the Ethereum network to handle around 44 transactions per second, instead of the previous limit of around 35. Ethereum’s on-chain transaction volume has remained fairly stable after the gas limit increase, indicating that the surge in the total gas usage likely originates from the increased use of more complex smart contracts which, in turn, require more gas.
Despite the gas limit increase, the demand for on-chain transactions in the Ethereum network remains high. In the days after the 25% gas increase, Ethereum blocks are full, which implies that further gas limit increase is needed.
The Network Remains Healthy
As Vitalik pointed out, an important parameter to show the “health” of the Ethereum mainnet is the uncle rate. He notes:
“In all blockchains of the Satoshian proof-of-work variety, any block that is published has the risk of becoming a “stale”, ie. not being part of the main chain, because another miner published a competing block before the recently published block reached them, leading to a situation where there is a “race” between two blocks and so one of the two will necessarily be left behind.
One important fact is that the more transactions a block contains (or the more gas a block uses), the longer it will take to propagate through the network.”
Through our close work with many of the mining pools, we can further see that the network is healthy and can handle a higher volume of TPS as bloXroute operates at the networking layer. There was no statistically significant increase in the uncle rate after the gas fee was increased by 25%. This is also true after the 25% increase in September 2019 (which also occurred after bloXroute went live).
Competing blocks cause a fork, where one block is included in the longest chain and the other becomes an uncle block. When forks occur, we measure the delta between the two blocks. We break those forks into 50 ms segments, which indicates how long it takes for miners to hear of a new block.
We can see that almost 20% of miners move to mine the next block within 100 ms (0.1 sec) after a new block is mined, and it takes about 0.6 sec for half of the miners to start mining the next block. Lastly, almost all (90%) of the hashpower is already working on the next block within 1.5 sec.
This should quiet the fears of those concerned that increasing the gas limit will break Ethereum as we’re not seeing a significant difference before and after gas increase.
Lastly, we measured the fork rate for the four largest ETH pools and found that they do not account for most of the forks, despite them controlling most of the hashpower. Rather, it’s the smaller pools who are the slowest to move on the next block. We are working closely with smaller pools to provide better network connectivity.
Conclusion
The Ethereum network was able to handle the gas rate increase, even though it fully consumed the additional block space. It’s clear that there is demand for a higher gas limit increase, and that a much higher gas limit can be safely deployed.
