An Analysis of Crypto Gas Wars in Ethereum

Abstract

Several years after NFTs first appeared, people began to use NFT to prove ownership of assets in diverse domains. Then the values of NFTs rapidly increased and accordingly the interests in NFTs have grown. Because Ethereum has the most active transactions and has a lot of users, many projects use Ethereum to deploy their NFT smart contracts. However, Ethereum has a chronic disadvantage of low scalability. During the NFT drop period for famous and popular NFTs, users are crowding the event, resulting in a large number of transactions to get NFTs. The low scalability leads to a fierce competition called the Crypto Gas War. In this work, we choose three famous NFT drop events to collect on-chain data of Ethereum over the drop period in order to analyze the impact of the Crypto Gas War on the Ethereum network in detail. In addition, we analyze the collected data to uncover critical and hidden problems, and present insights to solve them.