Illumination

A Hot Take on Surging Gas Prices

Ethereum gas prices rising - 2020-06-15

Friday night (or day, depending on where in the world you are) was a wild ride. At around 3AM (GMT+10) the Secure Data Links team were woken by the delightful noise of PagerDuty calling. Gas prices were soaring as high as 58 GWEI from earlier minimums of 30 GWEI, with an average as high as 43 GWEI. Consequently, network transaction fees were skyrocketing to well above a week-long high. This ultimately lead to increased transaction times on several nodes across the Chainlink network.

Total transaction fees of the Chainlink network over the week

As to be expected with the landscape described above, average block responses ranged from the usual 3–4 to reaching outliers above 50 blocks. Average responses held at around the 8–10 block response mark, however some of the most affected nodes raised their all time average response time up to the 15 block mark.

All time average block response times during congestion

Instantaneous block response times around the congestion

Events like these are exactly what COR can help deconstruct; understand; and ultimately down the line identify and reduce the impact felt. We are currently working diligently on several new analytics features that will allow you to gain even more insight from the data captured across the network. For example, in the spirit of free data we are moving towards what we coin customisable analytics. Something we are also passionate about is bringing real-time interactions to the end user as a third party, as well as predictive measures.

During the mean time, we aim to keep providing monthly updates as well as post-mortems of large scale events like these.

Got something to add? Get in touch via twitter or flick us a message in our discord, we’d love to hear from you.