The sudden popularity of Cryptokitties has demonstrated the limited bandwidth capacity of the Ethereum blockchain and completely blocked the network with more than 700,000 transactions per day.

The demand for Ethereum transactions has been growing steadily for several months but it seems only kittens have managed to create a critical overload. Ss a result the memory has grown up to 20,000 transactions and the commission for a simple transfer of Ethereum has reached 11 cents.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the miners refuse to increase the floating gas limit (analogous to the size of the Bitcoin block) because the percentage of “abandoned” blocks (ankles) is too large. Nick Johnson from the Ethereum Foundation explains:



Recently the Fund has been more concerned with the global problem of scaling, solving the problems of PoS and sharding by abandoning the seemingly insignificant problems of miners. However, the seemingly innocuous game with kittens requires urgent measures. Johnson lists some of them:



On the way to the simplest solution - an increase of gas-limit - it is necessary to eliminate several bottlenecks. The first of these is data storage and this problem has already been solved. Then, it is necessary to reduce the time for transferring new blocks between miners using data compression and, according to Johnson, it’s up to the Parity team.

In the near future Ethereum realizes its own version of FIBER, xThin or Graphene: this will significantly speed up the exchange of messages between miners which will drastically reduce the percentage of ancs.

Commenting on Ethermine’s refusal to increase gazlimit, Johnson said:



The timing of solving the problem even in the short term is not easy to determine, especially with regard to the efficiency of the blocks distribution. Johnson made the following assumptions:



Kittens have become only the "last straw" so that the demand for transactions is unlikely to fall much in the near future.

Vitalik Buterin made a tweet that 20 cents per transaction is an unacceptable price and most likely this is only a temporary phenomenon which will exist until the modifications will be made. However, this will also be a temporary solution before the implementation of Casper and sharding.

As for the realistic forecast for the next few weeks, the network will continue to overload and the commissions will continue to rise while full modifications of customers who can convince miners to raise the gas limit will appear at least at the end of the month, or most likely in early next year.