The ethereum network has returned to normal operations with fees back to about 5 cent following an increase in capacity to 10 million gas units.

Etheremine’s Asia based server or operation found the first 10 million block on Friday, with it using almost the entire new gas limit.

Far more blocks have been found since, leading to a significant reduction in pending transactions from a recent high of 120,000 to now about 70,000.

Ethereum pending transactions, Sep 2019

Even though the network now has more capacity and is using a bit more bytes per block, orphan (uncle) rates have not increased.

To the contrary, they’ve actually gone a bit down recently and may fall lower still once Istanbul goes on mainnet.

Ethereum uncles, Sep 2019

Transaction numbers have not increased either, with much of this capacity taken by just one gambling dapp which is currently using some 60% of ethereum’s network.

In normal conditions, however, ethereum should now be able to handle not far off from 2 million transactions a day, or about 2.5x from the current 700,000 daily transactions.

As its blocksize equivalent, the gas limit, is dynamic in that it can be changed by a miners’ simple vote, capacity could potentially be increased further down the line if there is significant usage.

That would be to just provide some temporary breathing room until eth 2.0 sharding, which is to proper scale ethereum perhaps as much as 1000x.

For now though ethereum’s capacity is back to just about meeting demand, with transactions continuing to have a low fee for next block inclusion.

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