Ethereum’s network fees have surged over 3,500% year-to-date. In January, the average transaction fee on Ethereum was $0.08, now the average fee is well above $3. Fees on the network are rising, even after ETH miners increased its gas limit from 10m to 12.5m per block. The hashrate is hovering above 200k GH/s, a level that has not been seen since 2018. The hashrate is rising as demand for DeFi applications has been growing exponentially over the last few months. So much so that DeFi platforms have seen their total value locked go from less than $1 billion in May, to over $4.6 billion today.

Etheroll pays transaction fees to the network for each game result. These costs have risen in line with network-wide transaction fees. The extreme surge in the cost of transacting on the network forces our hand into increasing the minimum bet to 3 eth and our result gas price to 200 gwei in order to be able to provide the network the fees required to return game results in a decent time-frame for players and to ensure the game continues running in a profitable manner via the built-in 1% house-edge mechanism.

In other words, we have built-in a dynamic minimum bet (‘cost’ to player) and result transaction fee (real cost to etheroll) which will be adjusted according to be economically viable and to match the gas market conditions daily until we can write and deploy much more gas efficient contracts or transaction fees fall. Of course, we have seen spikes in gas prices before, and hope this is only a temporary measure until gas prices come back down to earth after the hype surrounding the latest DeFi craze calms down. We saw gas price spike due to the ICO stage in 2017 and again with Cryptokitties in 2018. Eventually, network fees did return to normal, however we have never seen them rise like this, which is why we are taking such drastic action.

In light of this, our primary focus now is the complete re-engineering of our smart contract in order to attain a level of gas efficiency on the network which would allow Etheroll to scale and thrive during times of massive gas price increases such as this. In the meantime, these adjustments we are making today mean we are still able to cater to players who enjoy the thrill of playing Etheroll with a generally higher minimum bet (high rollers) even during times of massively increased gas fees.

We will continue to provide updates as necessary.