High transaction costs spark debate on scaling Ethereum
Issue: 042
Tezos marches forward
Despite all of its obstacles, Tezos continues forward, launching their betanet. The betanet is fully functional, but still very much experimental and expected to have bumps in the road. All transactions conducted on the betanet will be real transactions on the mainnet. The validation process for tezos, known as baking, has also begun.
Ethereum becoming congested and expensive
Transactions on the Ethereum network have become incredibly expensive. Coindesk reports that “ethereum users spent 5,862 ether, or $2.7 million, to send transactions on Monday”.
The main culprit stems from a new Chinese exchange. The exchange runs competitions to list new assets having users vote by depositing said asset onto the exchange. To help get their token listed, developers of different projects who want their token listed on the exchange are sending massive airdrops to their token holders to allow them to continue to increase their vote for their token. These airdrops are transactions across the network, driving the transaction fee sky high.
This has caused massive congestion on the network and made it very expensive to use. It has also brought the scaling debate to the forefront of the community. The community is proposing short-term fixes to help bring down fees, but the larger and longer-term fixes like sharding are still up in the air.
Andreesen Horowitz introduces their new crypto-focused fund
a16z announces their $300M venture fund making “investments in crypto companies and protocols”. The fund will have a dedicated team led by Chris Dixon focused solely on the new fund and the cryptoasset industry. Chris described the fund as long-term, all-weather, and flexible towards stage, asset-type, and geography.
Project Spotlight
- Blockstream continues to push Liquid, a sidechain to the Bitcoin network. This week the company announced “Issued Assets” on Liquid, paving the way to create new assets on top of bitcoin. These assets can be existing assets or completely new assets all together, aka new tokens.
- nopara73 introduces zkSNACKs’ Wasabi Wallet, a light wallet focused on privacy.
- Coinbase introduces GiveCrypto.org, a charitable fund that will raise money (cryptocurrencies) to be used for charitable acts.
- A new “Lapp”, Lightning spin, allows users to place bets (bitcoin) on a spinning wheel similar to the physical casino wheel.
