Cats and Ethereum love story
Who doesn’t love cats? Ethereum users surely do.
Back in 2017, at the dawn of NFTs, all eyes were on CryptoKitties – a game of breeding and collecting cute NFT kitties. It became so popular at one point that Kitties have clogged the entire Ethereum network, highlighting its scalability issues.
More than 3 years later a Hollywood actress Mila Kunis creates an animated series Stoner Cats (we wrote about it earlier), where cats’ NFTs allow access the movie. Once again, the demand surpassed developers’ expectations and Stoner Cats’ NFT release attracted so many people that its minting contract messed up gas estimations (ETH fee paid to the miners). Many users who did not manually adjust the gas price in Metamask, Ethereum wallet, didn’t have enough gas for all the steps within a transaction – which left them without cats and without the gas they paid. Not cool, especially knowing that Stoner Cats NFT prices are exploding.
The gas issue is important for Ethereum, and the upcoming EIP-1559 upgrade will replace gas first-price auction with a base fee, with a possibility to tip more. However, EIP-1559 will not resolve all Ethereum scalability issues – this would require a whole new blockchain with a whole new consensus type.
Good news, a PoS Ethereum 2.0 is expected to take over in 2022.
