Ethereum is already more popular than Bitcoin in Singapore

Ethereum’s network capacity has increased 9 percent since London. Founder Vitalik Buterin with explanations.

The “London” hard fork is bearing fruit. Since the launch of the update, some shortcomings within the Ethereum network have changed for the better. Thanks to the deflation mechanism and the associated token burn, the inflation rate at ETH has already dropped noticeably. CoinMetrics found in a report that 18,000 ETH have already been burned since London came into force.

The situation is different with network capacity. A look at the Daily Gas Used Chart reveals that the utilization of the Ethereum network has increased since the hard fork. Overall, ETH’s “gas consumption” jumped 9 percent – from 92 billion to just over 100 billion. This development does not correspond to the ups and downs of the gas fees, but is a measured increase in average consumption, which is an indicator of the total network capacity.

Daily Gas Used Chart, source: Etherscan.io

Ethereum founder provides three possible explanations

Ethereum mastermind Vitalik Buterin took this development as an opportunity to find possible reasons for the increase. The 27-year-old comes in a Reddit post on three possible Explanations.

On the one hand, the “Ethereum Ice Age” introduced by London has been delayed, which is why the average block time has fallen back to its long-term normal level of around 13.1 seconds. As a result, the rewards for miners have also decreased. On the other hand, there was more unused storage space available before the update, as the maximum gas consumption was limited to 15 million. In the meantime, however, this is no longer the maximum, but much more a self-imposed goal, explains Buterin.

As a third reason, the Ethereum founder blames the EIP-1559 (EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal) for the increased network load. The formula is not quite perfect when it comes to burning 50 percent of the basic fee, explained Buterin. There is a complex relationship between arithmetic and geometric means for block size and fee calculation. The average blocks are now fuller (a little more than 50 percent) than before the upgrade, which could ultimately have resulted in a slight increase in capacity.