MetaMask CryptoKitty Performance Update

Sorry for any delays in getting back to your pending support tickets, in the last week, since CryptoKitties launched, we’ve gained over 80 thousand new users!

Meanwhile, we have a small team, but are growing quickly, so please be patient while we get through all these requests!

The number one thing people are asking, is why are my transactions taking a long time, or failing?

When the network is backlogged because of lots of traffic, you might have to pay extra gas to get a transaction through. You can see the backlog here: https://etherscan.io/txsPending

You can usually get a transaction through by bidding a high enough gas price. You can get advice on good gas prices to bid here: http://ethgasstation.info/

You may have gotten an instant error that said “Insufficient price” or “Insufficient value”. We believe these were related to our backend having its memory filled up with so many pending kitty transactions!

We have increased the memory pool size, and those errors should be relieved for now. If you still have issues, and need to get a transaction through, you can always run a local Ethereum client and point MetaMask at it.

As usual, the answers to many common questions can be found on our support site.

We’ll get to you individually as soon as we can, thanks for your patience!

The Road Forward

All of these problems are related to the Ethereum blockchain’s throughput limit, which is around 15 transactions per second. Until that bottleneck is expanded, these are the limits we are working with, and the more popular Dapps there are, the more competitive the gas auction will become.

Obviously we can’t afford to have all of these problems whenever a great new app hits the decentralized web, and this is why Ethereum scaling strategies are so important.

A quick and easy way that CryptoKitties could reduce their load on the network is by allowing people to offer kittie sales without an on-chain transaction. This is already done by exchanges like 0x and EtherDelta, and is summarized in our recent article Scaling Web3 with SignTypedData.

Beyond that, we’re probably waiting for other blockchain scaling solutions like Plasma and Sharding to reach production, both of which rely on Proof of Stake, which is one of the reasons that it’s so important for this ecosystem to grow.

We hope this overview has been helpful!