Category: Gas

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Crypto News Ethereum Gas NFTs Sports Tokens

ConstitutionDAO: PEOPLE Price Pumps 200% as New ‘We The People’ Token Unveiled

When ConstitutionDAO was outbid in its effort to buy a rare, first-edition copy of the United States Constitution earlier this week, the community announced it would give donors a choice – either accept refunds, or remain in the DAO and receive a new “We The People” (WTP) governance token.

Refund Option Largely Ignored

Left with US$47 million worth of crowdfunded ETH reserves in its multi-signature wallets, ConstitutionDAO was probably unsurprised when many among its Discord community opted against refunds because of the associated high gas fees.

Most instead chose to receive WTP tokens without having to pay a gas fee at the rate of 1 PEOPLE per WTP, pumping the former token’s price by 200 percent. Meanwhile, ConstitutionDAO got to retain the capital in ETH. Win-win, with the bonus that the future price of WTP would rise in tandem with Ether.

DAOs Prove the Sky Is the Limit

DAOs are proving what a community can do when it chooses to achieve a collective goal. The day after ConstitutionDAO’s failed bid for the US Constitution, Krause House – an internet group named after late Chicago Bulls manager Jerry Krause – announced its intention to buy an NBA franchise, funded by the sale of NFTs. The group hit its goal of 200 ETH in the first 15 minutes of launching the sale via Mirror.

And earlier this year, Australian DeFi trading platform Tracer DAO managed to raise US$4.5 million in a strategic round of funding backed by various crypto companies.

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Blockchain Crypto Art Crypto News Gas NFTs

NFT Marketplace Rarible Inks Deal to Reduce High Gas Fees

Earlier this week, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Rarible.com and Rarible protocol announced it would be integrating with the Flow blockchain. The announcement means that Rarible users are now able to create, list and trade Flow-based NFTs on the Rarible marketplace.

Lower Gas Fees, Faster User Experience

The integration with Flow – a fast, decentralised, and sustainable blockchain – now allows users to create, list and trade Flow-based NFTs on the marketplace, ensuring lower gas fees and a swift user experience. As it stands, the most expensive type of transaction on Flow costs about US$0.0001, while the throughput on the blockchain is designed to scale to millions of active users.

Flow’s low gas fees and ability to scale many transactions is akin to what the popular project Sorare is achieving at the moment. A blockchain specifically tailored for optimal gaming and NFT experiences, Flow was originally created by Dapper Labs, which brought us CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot.

Since Flow was created with both end-users and developers in mind, it will also integrate with the Rarible Protocol, meaning that users can now make use of fully open-source infrastructure to create NFT projects with Flow’s refined developer ergonomics.

Rarible Makes Strides in the NFT Game

Rarible recently also announced that it would partner up with Adobe to enhance the attribution of NFTs on the Rarible marketplace. Adobe will soon launch a “prepare as NFT” option to its Photoshop software in an attempt to counter an otherwise highly exploitable market. The system to be built into Photoshop can assist in proving that the person selling an NFT is the one who made it.

The software will allow NFT sellers to link the Adobe ID with their crypto wallets, thereby allowing compatible NFT marketplaces, such as Rarible, to show verification certificates to prove the art is authentic.

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Crypto News DeFi Ethereum Gas Mining

Ethereum Miner Returns $22 Million After DeversiFi’s Erroneous Gas Fee

The decentralised exchange (DEX) DeversiFi mistakenly paid a fee of US$22 million for a transaction that should have been a fraction of the cost. The miner altruistically returned the funds seeing it was accidental, showing the cooperative side of the crypto community.

On September 27, “a deposit transaction was made by a DeversiFi hardware wallet from the main DeversiFi user interface with an erroneously high gas fee”, the exchange tweeted. The transaction was done through DeversiFi for Bitfinex in order to save on transaction fees.

This transaction was to deposit funds on the DeversiFi L2 solution. These transactions are extremely rare and third-party companies [usually] cover the costs of such integrations.

Bitfinex representative
The erroneous transaction: Etherscan

The details of the transaction can be seen on Etherscan where block 13307440 had a transaction fee of over $22 million for a $100,000 deposit transaction.

All You Need To Do Is Ask

While working on discovering the cause, the DeversiFi team said it reached out to Binance. The miner’s address continually routes funds to the centralised exchange; this is generally done to sell mined ETH.

Binance agreed to give the miner DeversiFi’s contact information, and the miner agreed to return the funds “after a few emails back and forth”. DeversiFi pushed for the miner to keep 50 ETH as a reward.

This was a show of crypto community spirit, given that because of the nature of the blockchain the miner could have kept the funds, and it’s unlikely any legal proceedings could have compelled him to return them.

While the mining pool that received the gas fee is anonymous, it is currently ranked ninth among the largest Ethereum miners and is responsible for roughly 3.1 percent of the network’s hash rate, according to Etherscan.

What Caused the Problem?

In a postmortem blog post on September 28, DeversiFi said that the exceedingly high gas fee was due to an error caused by a calculation mess-up in how the EthereumJS library processes decimals.

The team also said it worked with hardware wallet provider Ledger on a bug patch, and that the bug could only apply to large wallets such as theirs.

The team also wrote that DeversiFi has implemented “additional safety and sanity checks to ensure gas fees associated with transactions could not exceed unrealistic thresholds”. The new checks aim to “protect against user error, extreme network fee spikes” to serve as “an additional layer of protection against any future coding error”.

No customer funds on DeversiFi are at risk and this is an internal issue for DeversiFi to resolve, and operations are running as usual.

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Blockchain Crypto News Gas NFTs Solana

Solana Booms as NFT Projects Consider Switching From Ethereum

As the NFT space grows, more artists and content creators could move their works from Ethereum to Solana, the high-performance blockchain, due to the excessively high fees of the ETH network.

Ethereum is the largest NFT minting hub for now, though network congestion, slow transactions, high fees and other hurdles are prompting content creators to migrate to other NFT-supporting blockchains, and Solana seems to be the DeFi protocol picking up the most momentum for NFTs.

Take the example of a group called “Burnt Banksy”, which is building a blockchain platform on Solana called Burnt Finance. It all started when the group bought an original artwork from the otherwise anonymous English street artist known as Banksy for US$95,000 and resold it for US$400,000 on OpenSea, the leading decentralised NFT marketplace.

Innovative Features Make a Bull Case

While there are other platforms such as Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain and Cardano that offer scaling solutions with low gas fees, NFTs are growing faster on Solana than in other protocols.

One of the reasons is that Solana uses innovative features such as the cryptographic clock system called PoH (Proof of History), which manages to support 65,000 TPS (transactions per second) with a $0.0015 average fee per transaction.

Another reason that Solana is gaining momentum on the NFT market is that the level of competition is soaring on ETH-based platforms. It’s difficult to sustain businesses models on these platforms while also keeping pace with gas fees. Content creators with cheaper collections – around US$100 to US$500 raribles or collectibles – may expect Solana to stand out from ETH competition by offering cheaper NFTs thanks to Solana’s lower gas fees.

Other types of NFTs could thrive in Solana. Fractionalisation is a recent trend that’s blowing up now in the DeFi community. The idea is that you can buy a fraction of an NFT and receive exposure to it instead of paying for the complete piece, something that could work with Solana but wouldn’t with ETH’s current gas fees. For instance, if you want to buy a piece of a CryptoPunk for US$20, you would probably pay a similar amount for it in gas fees.

Solana’s NFT Marketplace Also Booming

Solanart is the protocol’s NFT marketplace, which recently registered an expanding transaction volume with over US$5 million in transactions in a single day.

As the NFT industry grows, the crypto community is shifting its eyes to other potential protocols to build on, and Solana seems one of the preferred candidates. The ETH community, on the other hand, is looking to the rollout of ETH 2.0, which is expected to fix the network’s scaling challenges and gas fees.

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Blockchain Crypto News Ethereum Gas

ETH Price Holds Strong as London Hard Fork Goes Live Successfully

August 5 was D-day for Ethereum’s London hard fork and saw its price remain strong following a 12-day winning streak. The long-anticipated upgrade will bring improvements to the efficacy of transactions on the network until Ethereum 2.0 is deployed in 2022.

Ethereum has gone live with some significant changes to its network. Five Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) are under way, the most notable being EIP-1559.

Saving on Transaction Fees

EIP-1559 is said to lower the transaction fees on Ethereum, but this is not entirely true. EIP-1559 will not so much lower the transaction fees as allow a better gauge of the actual transaction fee.

Users will no longer need to ‘cushion’ transactions with extra gas to ensure that miners process the transaction, allowing users to estimate the transaction cost more precisely and thus pay less. A developer at the Ethereum Foundation, Tim Beiko, has gone on to clarify that the cost will not be a “20x reduction” but instead a “20 percent reduction”.

‘Ultra-sound’ era

The London Hard Fork has introduced a deflationary model for Ether (ETH), with EIP-1559 setting the scene for what some have called an ‘ultra-sound’ era for Ethereum.

EIP-1559 will be destroying a large part of the high mining fees on Ethereum. The London hard fork means that transaction fees once paid to miners will now be burned and removed from circulation altogether.

The move has promoted Ethereuns to speculate that this will lead to a supply crunch as more of the coin is removed from circulation. Along with a decrease in supply, DeFi and NFTs within the Ethereum ecosystem increase the demand for Ethereum, so it is expected that the price of ETH will continue to rise.

The price has remained relatively stable following the London hard fork going live, with a drop of 0.14 percent in the past 24 hours. This follows a winning streak of 12 consecutive days and a price gain of 43 percent. 

It remains to be seen if the price of Ethereum has risen and will continue to rise due to a greater demand for the cryptocurrency.

By Jana Serfontein, Crypto News Australia Guest Author

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Crypto News Ethereum Gas Mining

$1 Million in ETH Burned 3 Hours Following London Hard Fork

The long-awaited Ethereum hard fork has been operational for a few days now and with a massive amount of ETH already burned, the currency could be well on its way to becoming deflationary.

At the time of writing, the total amount of Ethereum (ETH) burned since the London hard fork had already run up to 4300 ETH, about US$11 million worth of the digital currency. The network is burning the digital currency at approximately 3.68 ETH ($10,295) every minute on average.

Ethereum burn statistics. Source: watch the burn.com

The update has integrated a new mechanism that burns a portion of the base fee of a transaction, while the other portion goes to the miner. Shortly after implementation, the price of Ethereum jumped more than 6 percent, adding to its 12-day price gain.

Many other updates were administered in the Ethereum hard fork, and here’s what you need to know.

Change to a Flexible Monetary Policy Aids Deflation

By burning the majority of the base fee of transactions, the mechanism aims to deflate the supply of Ethereum. While a sustained rate of over 2 ETH per block is necessary to see Ethereum’s supply deflate, EIP-1559 is the first step on its road to a deflationary monetary currency.

The much anticipated EIP1559 network upgrade was a huge day for the Ethereum cryptocurrency ecosystem. Now, every transaction, NFT purchase or loan on the Ethereum network will result in ETH being burned out of existence, making ETH a deflationary and inflation-busting asset.

Ross Middleton, chief financial officer, DeversiFi

What Does the Change Mean for Users and Miners?

Looking at user experience, gas fees and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), topics that usually have a negative connotation when talking about Ethereum are being solved.

Anyone sending a transaction will know the fee in advance; users currently have to submit a bid to miners, which can lead to overpaying or long wait times if the fee is too low. Meanwhile, the block size increase means the queue to get in will be faster during peak congestion […] To avoid being subject to gas price manipulation for gas refunds, smart contracts need access to a decent trustless gas price oracle. That’s another thing EIP-1559 solves.

Justin Drake, Ethereum 2.0 researcher

However, what miners will get from transactions is a fraction of what they used to be. While the current Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism sees Ethereum pay miners more than 12,000 ETH every day, experts believe Proof-of-Stake will reduce that to around 1,000 ETH per day.

When ETH gets burned it becomes more scarce, which benefits all holders. With enough activity on the network, the amount of ETH burned through transactions could surpass the amount issued to validators through Proof-of-Stake. This would make ETH deflationary, or as Drake would say, “ultrasound”.

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Ethereum Gas NFTs

$719,000 Lost in Failed ETH Transactions as Stoner Cats NFT Cartoon Goes Live

The new animated adult show Stoner Cats lost close to its total of 310 Ethereum (US$719,000) from failed minting of associated NFTs. Due to the huge demand, the NFTs sold out in record time, spurring an incident where miners were mostly only able to process high gas fee transactions.

Stoner Cats title page: Let’s Eat Cake

The latest non-fungible token (NFT) craze took place on the Ethereum blockchain this week with the release of Stoner Cats, an animated cartoon series with a few hard hitters on board such as Chris Rock, Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane, and even Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

The first drop on July 27 made a total of 10,420 NFTs available and they were selling for 0.35 ETH each on the Stoner Cats website. (The NFT doubles as exclusive early access to the show before opening to the public, and provides lifetime access to the future episodes.) The high demand for the cartoon drove the network to capacity:

High Network Capacity Leads to High Fees

Selling out in minutes, the volume of purchases drove the gas price off the scale. When transactions are conducted on the Ethereum blockchain, like most blockchains it requires gas (gwei for Ethereum) in order to enable miners to process transactions or mint NFTs.

Users who didn’t set a high enough gas price had transactions that were left uncompleted as miners opted for higher-priced transactions.

In this case the gas limit wasn’t set high enough to cover all steps in the transaction, so the transaction failed. However it’s not failing until it runs out, so ~100% of allocated gas is actually being used even without the transaction succeeding.

Daniel Kuhn, Coindesk

During such situations, competition for transactions to be written into the block increases, incentivising miners to prioritise the highest-priced transactions. The developers are being held responsible for not setting the default gas limit high enough.

Blockchain a New Funding Medium for TV?

Stoner Cats is the first TV show to be funded entirely from the sale of NFTs. The team behind it says this was done to escape TV network censorship and retain creative control. The production team, led by producer Mila Kunis and husband and fellow actor Aston Kutcher, plans to release a further 3,000 NFTs per episode and will continue making the series as long as fundraising goals are met.

The profit realised by the NFT sales indicates the Stoner Cats team must have made more than US$8 million on the 10,000 NFTs.

The upcoming Ethereum documentary Ethereum: The Infinite Garden has also recently had its very successful funding round and is planned to premiere by 2023.

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Crypto News Ethereum Gas NFTs

Trader Loses $13,000 Trying to Buy Ethereum Token – Out of Gas Error!

Cats have choked the Ethereum network once again, but this time it isn’t CryptoKittys but Stoner Cats – the hot new NFT collection of feline characters from the much-anticipated animated series Stoner Cats, developed by actor/producer Mila Kunis and guest-starring Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Fans were at the mercy of an Ethereum gas war as 10,420 Stoner Cats NFTs sold out at 0.35 ETH (about US$837) each within 40 minutes. But some fans were left without their money and without a cat. A post titled Some poor guy loses $13k in fees for a failed transaction appeared on reddit, showing how one buyer lost 5.8 ETH (US$13,916) in a single transaction fee trying to buy his Stoner Cat token.

Stoner Cat, Baxter. Source: stonercats.com

Dune Analytics reported that many others suffered the same fate, showing that 344.6 ETH (US$825,000) were lost to failed transactions. According to DeFi news site The Defiant, many users lost trying to mint their Stoner Cats NFTs (20 was the maximum allowed) without manually adjusting the gas limit in Metamask. Those whose bids were placed earlier didn’t have enough gwei to pay for the entire transaction, which caused the transactions to fail.

Once again the Ethereum network could not meet the high demand of a popular release, as too many users caused gas prices to be pushed higher, resulting in failed transactions and lost funds to exuberant gas fees.

It’s possible that Stoner Cat developers failed to anticipate the demand for the project and set the minimum gas price too low. This is something that needs to be considered moving forward for fundraising efforts such as this, to avoid leaving supporting fans out of pocket.

Stoner Cats is the first TV show of this kind to be entirely funded by NFTs. The show raised over US$8 million on Wednesday through the sale of the Stoner Cats NFTs. The production team – headed by known crypto lover Ashton Kutcher and wife Mila Kunis – plans to release a further 3,000 NFTs per episode.

The series’ first episode, “Stoned Awakening”, is set to premiere today, July 30. Watch the Stoner Cats trailer on Youtube here.

How ETH Gas Fees Work 

When a transaction fails on the Ethereum network, users are still charged. This is a common complaint from frustrated users of the biggest blockchain in DeFi. Etherscan will provide an estimate of how long it will take for a transaction to go through, but when the network is overloaded users may experience the dreaded processing loop, eventually resulting in the status: Fail.

The insanely expensive gas fees on the Ethereum network have seen many opting into other blockchains such as the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), where fees are much lower. In February, ETH gas fees hit all-time highs of up to US$20,000.

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Crypto News Ethereum Gas

Users Raise Security Concerns of Chrome/Brave Extension “GasNow”

Browser extension GasNow, which is used to keep track of Ethereum gas fees, has recently gained permission settings that are unsettling some of the crypto community.

GasNow is an extension available on Chrome and Brave browsers that allows users to track gas fees and set up alerts. Following a recent update to the app, it now asks to have access and modify what’s in your clipboard (when you copy text or other data with a device it gets put on the clipboard).

Security Concerns

This is a major security concern because, when you copy an address to send funds to, the extension can detect that event and switch the address with another when you paste it.

This will lead to your funds being sent to another address and your crypto being lost in cyberspace if you don’t double-check the address you pasted. Other scams have happened before due to malicious Chrome extensions.

Comments on Chrome web store

This automatically creates a problem for Brave users as well since third-party extensions are not vetted by Brave individually, and the Brave browser can only use Chrome extensions.

What The Developers Said

Most financial/crypto developers are usually aware of the massive security risk with this permission (not just crypto but in general, as it can be used to collect passwords). With such a potential added risk, individuals in the crypto space are becoming increasingly skittish with the proliferation of scams in recent times.

If you are using another similar extension, check the permissions that have been granted because there are other extensions using this technique. And remember to Do Your Own Research (DYOR).

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Crypto News DeFi Ethereum Gas

Aave to Use Ethereum Sidechain to Reduce Transaction Costs

Decentralised finance (DeFi) firm Aave liquidity protocol is working with Polygon (formerly known as MATIC) an Ethereum side-chain project to alleviate congestion and transaction fees on second-largest public blockchain.

In an announcement by Aave integration lead Marc Zeller, they will be exploring Ethereum sidechain technology for an increased user experience.

Block space supply today is scarce and limited, and since the “DeFi Summer” of 2020, demand for using Ethereum and DeFi has never slowed down […] High transaction fees are a feature of a successful public blockchain, as they define actors ready to pay the market price to use the decentralised services.

Marc Zeller, Integrations lead at Aave

One of the main assets of DeFi is the ability to build synergies with other projects, and by having an Aave Market in all the venues that matter, there’s no need for a “winner-takes-all” scalability solution and users can choose the solution they feel comfortable with.

Stani Kulechov, Aave founder

Polygon Sidechain Integration

Polygon is a scalable sidechain of Ethereum and boasts a growing ecosystem, with some of the favourites being  Aavegotchi and decentralised exchange Quickswap. Polygon is also powered by Chainlink oracles, benefiting Aave by gaining access to high quality and security price-data.

A sidechain on Ethereum refers to any mechanism that allows tokens from the layer 1 mainchain to be securely used within a completely separate blockchain but still moved back to the original chain if necessary.

Polygon will also be bringing in a smart-contract bridge to allow various other assets. Users of the bridge will receive part of the transaction fee used in MATIC tokens to cover most of their transaction fees on the Polygon blockchain.

A look at some of the fees:

  • Deposit AAVE : $0.000061
  • Borrow USDC : $0.000102
  • Withdraw AAVE : $0.000109
  • Repay USDC : $0.000072

At launch the following assets will be onboarded on the Polygon Aave Market :

  • MATIC
  • USDC
  • USDT
  • DAI
  • WETH
  • AAVE
  • WBTC

With close to $43 billion currently locked within DeFi lending platforms. Built on Ethereum, Aave, a DeFi protocol aimed at both retail and institutional clients, has a market size of $6.48 billion, making it the third largest in the sector, according to DeFi Pulse. Aave has also integrated with Transak to enable the direct purchase of Polygon assets with fiat currencies.