Afri Schoedon, a developer working on the Parity client for Ethereum, recently noted that Ethereum was running at full capacity urging developers to look elsewhere and for other ways to deploy their decentralized apps.
What followed was a mild debate and clarifications about the state of the Ethereum ecosystem involving no lesser a person than the co-creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin.
In a series of tweets, Schoedon wrote:
“Please stop deploying d-apps to Ethereum. We are running at capacity…Use $ETC, $POA, or whatever else is available and bridge important stuff, these networks have plenty of capacity and are well supported by MyCrypto, MetaMask, etc…Meta-decentralize your d-apps. Thanks.’
Vitalik Buterin Disagrees
“Disagree,” replied Buterin as he proceeded to describe how developers could still deploy optimally on the network. He explained:
“Most dapps have lots of room to gas-optimize, and even if *you* don’t your dapp running raises gas fees and pressures *others* to gas-optimize. There’s *plenty* of low-value spam on chain. And everyone should be looking into layer-2 solutions.”
In essence, Buterin argued that while Ethereum may appear to be running at capacity, this included many unimportant transactions which could be kicked out. “Good dapps can kick bad ones out,” he writes.
The issue of Ethereum Scalability
Probably the biggest concern among ethereum developer and members of the community is how to solve increase the transaction capacity of the network and this has led to several scaling solutions in the works.
The Cryptokittes incident, where the ethereum network was clogged and ground to a halt, exposed this issue with the network. Since then, ethereum developers have intensified efforts to solve the scalability issues.
Smartereum reported that The Ethereum Foundation will launch at least one major scaling solution before the end of this year. According to Virgil Griffith, representative of the Ethereum Foundation Special Projects, State Channels and Plasma are nearing conclusion while Sharding and Casper remain unsolved scientific problems.
While the community waits for these solutions, Buterin explained that network could do with some optimizations that don’t require “fancy technology”.
Instead of deploying DApps on “compatible networks” like Ethereum Classic [ETC] or POA network, as suggested by Schoedon, Buterin pointed out that the network could be run more efficiently. He cited an instance:
“One example is that the current on-chain DEXes take >200k gas for a transaction, which I think could absolutely be cut down by more than a factor of 2.”
Solomon Sunny is the market reporter for Smartereum, one of the global leaders in Ethereum, blockchain and currency news. He produces technical price updates on digital currencies and writes recent developments about blockchain.
