Daily Transactions on Polygon (MATIC) Tank After the Gas Hike to Fight Spam

The daily transactions on Ethereum layer Polygon dropped significantly after the team decided to push a client update to increase the minimum gas to fight spam and improve network health.

“Even if all the validators adopt this setting, the gas prices are still expected to remain extremely low ($0.001 – $0.01) for the end-users,” said the team on Saturday.

On Oct. 9, the day the Polygon team tweeted its decision, the daily transactions fell to about 2.9 million, down from more than 6 million earlier this month and over 7 million on Sept. 26. In April this year, the network started seeing traction and hit an all-time high at 9.17 million in mid-June.

Community members weren’t thrilled with the team’s decision to hike the fees, with many disagreeing with it while others were saying that this increase is too drastic.

The team meanwhile maintains that minimum gas price is not a network level setting or upgrade rather a client level setting as such validators are free to decide if they want to increase the fees.

“This is an optional setting for Polygon PoS nodes/clients.”

“Polygon PoS is a decentralized network, so it is completely up to validators to decide whether they will accept this value or configure their nodes to another value.”

However, the Polygon team made the already changes in the nodes they are operating before sharing the same with the community.

Average gas in result spiked and has been keeping above 50 Gwei since then, which is likely to be what caused the daily transaction count to fall substantially.

Polygon is the sixth-largest blockchain by asset, locked at $4.29 billion, down from a $10.54 billion peak on June 15. Recently, Polygon surpassed Ethereum in daily active addresses.