- The recent surge in meme coin trends has put a spotlight on the issues in the Ethereum blockchain.
- A crypto influencer highlighted the inflated gas fees and network congestion following the meme coin hype.
- Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that high gas fees as a liveness failure.
The recent hype around meme coins has put a spotlight on Ethereum, the blockchain that most mainstream meme coins operate on. Recent projects including $PEPE and $WSB prompted the revival of the meme coin trend, but the hype came with problems for network validators and other Ethereum users as well.
A crypto influencer who goes by Gumshoe on Twitter, recently shared a Twitter thread to highlight the impact of the ongoing meme coin season on Ethereum. According to him, the rising popularity of meme coins brought out the structural problems in the Ethereum blockchain, with arguably the largest of them being the transaction fees or gas fees.
While Ethereum has historically been known for its infamous gas fee problem, the meme coin season has accentuated the network’s notorious gas fees. The rise of PEPE has made it worse to the point where users are paying as much as $200 per transaction. “In fact, gas fees are so high that most users need help to even transact on the chain,” the influencer tweeted.
With its current capacity to process 29 transactions per second (TPS), the increased transactions amid the ongoing memecoin frenzy have led to a higher processing time. The heavily congested network had more than 157,000 transactions pending at the time of writing. That number was at 200,000 earlier this week.
Its founder has admitted that the chain is experiencing a liveness failure if the fees are high! pic.twitter.com/Lf6h6WDs4n— gumshoe (@0xGumshoe) May 9, 2023
Assuming that the network validators process 15 transactions per second, the pending transactions will take more than three hours to clear. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated back in 2018 that high gas fees should count as “a de-facto liveness failure”. While his comments were made in reference to Bitcoin, the irony is that they apply to his own blockchain today.
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