The Ethereum network is registering a surge in usage which means that the transaction fee might again become a prominent source of income for the miners on the Ethereum network.
The period of heightened activity on the Ethereum network has seen the native use of Gas tokens reach the block limit, which means 100 of the Gas tokens are in use.
The 100% block limit for gas tokens was reached on Thursday and the price for Gas tokens was slightly higher at 7 gWei for the fastest transactions. A Gas token based smart contract on the Ethereum network can burn 18% of all gas.
Mind you Gas is the fuel of operations on the Ethereum network, even though the native token is Ether. Every transaction on the Ethereum network is fuelled by the Gas token, and the users can increase or decrease the transaction fee depending on the speed at which they want their transactions to be verified by the miners.
The upper and lower limit for the Gas tokens to be used for any particular activity on the network is fixed by the network, while the consumers can make changes within the set limit to get their transactions verified faster than others.
What Are the Probable Causes for An Increased Usage of Gas?
The increased use of the Gas token has been so significant in recent times that it has also surpassed the movement of Ether on the trade market. Earlier the peak gas was seen during the 2017 price rise and again in 2018 when the ICO was in trends and daily one or the ICO conduction was going on around the globe.
However, the current Gas peak usage has been caused by various factors, where a ton of usage is coming from the decentralized application that too from the gaming applications to be more specific. In the decentralized gaming applications like FOMO3D, users need to place their bets using the Gas tokens.
So, even though the population on the decentralized applications of Ethereum network is considerably low, there are certain applications which consume a ton of Gas for their operations.
Other reason for a heightened Gas usage could be the users deliberately paying a higher gas fee for transaction verification in order to hide the origins of the funds. It's quite common for the miners to select a transaction with a higher gas fee attached to it earlier than other transactions with a lower gas fee. Mind you these transaction fee is different from the Block reward which is fixed at 2 ETH per block.
The Ethereum network has seen a slower mining activity in last three months mainly because of its anti-ASIC stand, where it does not want the miners to use ASIC rigs to mine Ethereum blocks.
However, the core team has not initiated any anti-asic protocol as of now, if that comes into the picture, the mining activities can go even slower. Currently, the Ethereum network is producing a max hashing power of 148 TH/s.
Conclusion
Etherum network has recently gone through the Constantinople fork in order to implement certain major software update to the network. The hard-fork got delayed earlier due to a bug found during the trial run, so many expected its price to go lower after the fork. But, Ethereum has maintained a constant of around $140 since the hard-fork.
Hopefully, the heightened Gas usage would also be reflected in the trade market prices which hasn't been the case until now.
