Sunflower Farmers - The Play2Earn Game That's Consuming Polygon

Anyone else have PTSD from the CryptoKitties days? Remember when Crypto Kitties hit and gave the Ethereum blockchain the hug of death? Well - it's happening to the layer 2 solutions now. Polygon is getting eaten alive by 1 single dapp.

Sunflower Farmers

Sunflower Farmers is a play to earn game on Polygon where users are able to plant crops and earn SFF tokens for playing. Users can craft NFT items and farm resources. The crafting is very similar to Minecraft in that users can create their own recipes. Users and holders of the SFF token earn a cut of rewards distributed every 3 days. This is starting to sound very attractive in terms of rewards so I see why it is getting a lot of attention. I have not looks at the tokenomics or actually played the game yet but I definitely plan to. I'll probably do a separate post with some gameplay and such, but for now I'm just here to talk about the effect that this game is having on the Polygon chain.

Looking at Polygonscan above, you can see that on the gas tracker, the average fee per transaction is 600 Gwei. This is insane for Polygon. The "normal" gas fees lately have been less than 50 Gwei, usually closer to 10 Gwei. As Polygon has gotten more attention and started having more projects built on it, the gas fees of course increased. They also recently announced the implementation of EIP-1559 burning of the MATIC token which is going to drive the price of MATIC up in theory. At 99.8% network usage, the gas fees can be pretty expensive especially for a chain that is meant to have negligible fees.

With almost 8000 pending transactions, the layer 2 gas wars have begun. Some of the pending transactions have fees as high as 1,555 Gwei. Obviously this is nothing like Ethereum's insane fees lately, but it does raise a little bit of concern. If 1 dapp can consume the network like this, imagine when Polygon gets even more adoption and there are multiple games like this running at the same time. That's when the gas wars will really kick in. This really makes me question how much more scalable Polygon makes Ethereum as a layer 2 solution. If the layer 2 solution is decimated with pending transactions and fees continue to rise.... What's the point of the layer 2? I guess the good thing here is that there are multiple different layer 2 solutions for Ethereum, but people tend to gravitate toward one. Polygon. This seems very probleMATIC hahahaha.

Hive as a solution

Ok, so follow me here. If you know anything about the Hive blockchain, you know that there are nearly no fees and that transactions are instant and immutable. There are very few blockchain-intense games using the chain with Splinterlands being the exception. Why would you want to build your game on a blockchain that has fees that, while small, will add up very quickly. This is especially true for games like Sunflower Farmers where every single action is an on-chain transaction. Imagine playing this game for a few hours, you might be doing 100 transactions. That can add up rather quickly. One solution would be performing actions off-chain and just settling on chain to create less congestion... But that takes a whole lot more effort from devs than just building on a chain built for micro-transactions. Not a chain that's supposed to be a layer 2 solution to high fees that suffers from the same issues that the layer 1 does. I'm no developer, not am I a blockchain expert. This is just my 2 sats, for whatever that might be worth.