Ethereum’s digital ledger, which was thought to be a greater version of Bitcoin, is running out of capacity.
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Co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin warned that the price of processing transactions performed in the digital token Ether on the underlying blockchain may become too expensive for some users. Ether’s network utilization has fastened into the 90% level, according to tracker Etherscan.io. Buterin mentioned that as utilization rises, transactions prices could trail suit, possibly making potential corporate users stop using Ethereum.
Approximately two years ago, when CryptoKitties launched Ethereum was getting plugged up, but as there were thousand of scams detected and removed the space was freed on the network. More freshly, as a majority of the ICOs went bust, a new holder is taking over Ethereum: Tether.
During the last 30 days, Tether paid computers which process transactions on Ethereum’s digital ledger $260,000 in charges. That’s about 17.5 times more than CryptoKitties and six times more than IDEX. Tether’s market capitalization recently passed $4 billion. And at least 40% of all Tether runs on the Ethereum network, according to a finance professor at The University of Texas at Austin John Griffin. Some developers are staying away from Ethereum for now, waiting for it to tweak its technology to increase network capacity, said Jeff Dorman, chief investment officer at Arca.
Ethereum is still working to figure out how to get to its ambitious vision of Ethereum 2.0 -- requiring a major overhaul of its technology that some worry may not even work.
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The number of Ethereum transactions is actually down from their peak in January 2018, according to Etherscan.io. Average Ethereum transaction fees are still many times lower than Bitcoin’s, but they’ve been volatile, according to BitInfoCharts.com.