Is Ethereum public chain congestion true? What is the solution?

Ethereum, as a leading smart contract platform, has boomed its decentralized applications (DApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems, making it one of the largest blockchains with user scale. However, with the continued growth of user numbers and application size, and the continuous increase in transaction fees, the user experience has been significantly affected. Is the Ethereum network congestion problem true? The answer is yes. This article will discuss this in-depth.

Ethereum network congestion: real problems

Ethereum network congestion is an objective reality. As a distributed computing platform based on blockchain technology, it supports smart contracts, tokens and various decentralized applications. However, its inherent network architecture also presents challenges, with the most notable of which is network congestion. Congestion has led to slowing transactions, soaring miner fees (Gas fees) and a decline in user experience.

This congestion is not accidental, especially during peak network activity. Ethereum has limited transaction processing capacity (Gas Limit) per block, and when the transaction volume exceeds this limit, the network processing capacity is very tight. Ethereum's transaction processing volume per second (TPS) is relatively low, usually around 15-30 transactions.

Multiple factors have led to congestion in Ethereum:

• Explosive growth in DeFi applications: The widespread use of the DeFi protocol has led to a surge in transaction volume.
• NFT boom: NFT casting and trading consume a lot of Gas.
• Project launch and airdrop: New project releases or airdrop activities attract a large number of users to participate, further exacerbating the burden on the Internet.
• Gas fee auction mechanism: Ethereum adopts an auction mechanism to determine transaction priority. When the transaction volume is large, users compete to increase the Gas fee to ensure the transaction is processed quickly, resulting in severe fluctuations in fees.

Solutions to deal with Ethereum network congestion

In order to solve the Ethereum network congestion problem, the community is actively exploring a variety of solutions, mainly including:

1. Technical upgrade: The "merger" completed in 2022 will switch the Ethereum consensus mechanism from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), which improves efficiency and reduces energy consumption, laying the foundation for future expansion. In the future, sharding technology will further improve network throughput.

2. Scaling expansion solution:

   Rollup technologies such as Arbitrum, Optimism and zkSync can effectively reduce the burden on the main network by transferring some transactions to the second-layer network for processing. These solutions have been widely used in DeFi and DApp projects. State channel and side chain technologies also provide additional capacity expansion pathways.

3. Gas fee mechanism improvement:

   EIP-1559 upgrade introduces a basic fee and reminder fee mechanism, reducing the volatility of the Gas fee and controlling Ethereum inflation by destroying the basic fee.

In short, Ethereum network congestion is a real and complex problem, and its roots are network capacity limitations and rapid growth in user demand. Although this will affect the user experience, the Ethereum community is actively working to continuously improve network performance through technological upgrades and scaling solutions. Users can also optimize their trading efficiency and reduce costs by selecting the appropriate trading time, using Layer 2 solutions, and using tools to monitor Gas fees.

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