Returning from the holidays, on-chain activities have resumed on various scaling networks. It’s been reported that massive traffic occurred on Ethereum’s L2 network Polygon last week, with activities, such as NFT games the reported cause. According to the Polygon team, the popular P2E game Sunflower Farmers, was responsible for the supposed network traffic on the scaling solution.
Prominent blockchain analyst Wu Blockchain reports that the demand for the NFT game also caused gas fees to skyrocket by a whopping 40%, eclipsing 700 gwei. The second account, which trails the first account, consumed about 3% within two days last week.
Surge In Gas Fees Affecting Deployment of DApps
By the end of last December, the Sunflowers P2E game caused the gas fee on the network to rise 16x. The surge is reportedly affecting the use of some decentralized applications, such as the Double Protocol.
The DApp, a NFT rental platform, released a statement earlier today, stating the postponement of its Alpha Pass originally scheduled to hold on January 5. The platform cited congestion and increase in the gas fees as reasons, but promised to announce a new release date soon.
Sunflowers Farmers is a blockchain-powered game that incentivizes players to compete against each other to farm crops for some token rewards. Players earn SFF tokens for constantly planting, weeding, and harvesting crops.
Players can use their earned tokens to purchase in-game assets. Since this game is hosted on the L2 scaling solution, gamers are taking advantage of the high gas fees to get a larger portion of $SFF.
Despite the recent surge on Polygon, its gas fees are very affordable compared to the ETH network. While a transaction costs about 700 gwei on Polygon, the transaction costs on Ethereum averages $75.
MATIC Continues to Rally Despite Red Crypto Market
Polygon’s MATIC has broken boundaries to remain high in a declining crypto market. Compared to other virtual currencies that began 2022 poorly, MATIC started really well, but today’s market seemed unfavorable.
Last week, the native crypto of the Polygon network rose to its A.T.H. of $2.87. Some experts had envisioned that MATIC would sustain this momentum, but the general crypto bear market had its effect on the cryptocurrency.
As of the time of writing, MATIC is exchanging hands at $2.14. The interesting news is that if the crypto manages to turn things around from here, we can expect a surge in prices.
Meanwhile, the OG of cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has declined to a new low for almost a month, trading around $42k as of the time of this publication. Given the market indicators, BTC could be in for another bloodbath.