NFT game makes Polygon rates skyrocket 1,000%
2 min readPolygon (MATIC) network rates have seen a strong spike of over 1,000% in the last 24 hours. According to website data Polygonscan, the standard rates even reached 500 Gwei. High-speed rates became even more expensive, surpassing the figure of 812 Gwei.
According to security analyst Thomas Kerbl, the reason was the game Sunflower Farmers, which consumed more than 50% of the network fees. The game has a simple dynamic, but each action performed in it requires a blockchain transaction.
As the game was in strong demand, the result was a considerable increase in the volume of operations at MATIC. As a result, the network began to suffer a series of distributed denial attacks (DDoS).
However, these attacks were not malicious or intentional, but the result of the game’s dynamics. In a way, it was the same thing that happened with CryptoKitties in 2017. At the time, the excess of operations ended up overloading the ETH network, something that happened now at MATIC.
“It turns out that the developers considered it a good idea to store the current state of each player’s state on the blockchain – every 25 minutes! And, just imagine!, a new game with monetary incentive attracted a ton of bots trying to extract value,” Kerbl said.
Bots and miners take advantage
As activity at MATIC increased, block validation became more attractive, which led validators to try to extract value from the situation. In this sense, MATIC recorded a series of empty blocks and others with high rates.
This procedure increases network activity, but concentrates this activity in fewer blocks. As a result, rates of gas tend to go up. In fact, a graph from Delphi Digital shows that the percentage of empty blocks in MATIC (purple bars) exceeded 10%.
The use of bots cited by Kerbl is a common practice in many games play-to-earn. They are created by players and automatically controlled to earn in-game rewards. As robots operate at greater speeds than human players, their creators have the upper hand.
On the other hand, players who control their own characters tend to take losses, which increases the game’s concentration. Therefore, networks such as Axie Infinity and others have already established resources to combat the use of bots.
