Yield farmers and liquidity miners should be rejoicing this week after SparkPool, one of the leading Ethereum mining pools in China, finally made it easy to calculate how much they’ll pay for withdrawing their earnings. Furthermore, it took SparkPool just five hours to create the GasNow tool.
Market demands
The release of the COMP token by DeFi protocol Compound led to a huge demand for yield-farming projects, which drove up the number of transactions conducted on the Ethereum blockchain. This led to the congestion of the Ethereum network and users paying higher gas fees to execute transactions.
As a result, liquidity mining of DeFi tokens led to a sustained increase in daily gas fees over the past three months. The daily gas used reached an all-time high of 80.18 billion in early September.
As DeFi started to pick up steam, the dev team at Sparkpool realized that there was a grey space between quoted gas fees from the ETH Gas Station and the actual gas fees then processed on the network. An obvious problem for everyone involved.
On August 12 2020, they decided to hack together a tool to give themselves a more accurate and timely prediction of gas fees. GasNow was born.
After SparkPool was happy with the tool they created, it was released to the public. First signs are extremely positive and it would appear that yield farmers and liquidity providers pounced at the chance to calculate more reliable ways of calculating gas fees.
Already, some of the worlds leading cryptocurrency wallets such as MYKEY, TokenPocket, imToken, and MathWallet have already incorporated GasNow onto their platforms.
What is GasNow?
GasNow is a calculator that accurately projects actual gas prices. The tool shows users gas fee estimates based on parameters such as the exact number of unprocessed transactions on mempool and Ethereum’s global queue of unprocessed transactions.
By abandoning historical for predictive data from pending transactions the calculator solves an earlier problem. In the past, gas price prediction tools provided estimates which greatly differed from the actual fees charged by the Ethereum blockchain. Best of all, GasNow is free to use for the foreseeable future.
Life before GasNow
Products such as ETH gas station and Etherscan have become ‘go-to’ resources for this information. But, while they provided gas price estimates, some of the calculations have been accused of being far from accurate.
In reality, users were playing a game. Since the tools mentioned above provided only an estimate for the Ethereum blockchain to then later process transactions at a higher gas fee.
Future moves
The team at Sparkpool has been fine-tuning the accuracy of pending data queues. In addition, the majority of GasNow’s users are based in mainland China but an increasing number of users from abroad are starting to use it.
GasNow is a fresh breath of air when the whole crypto world is forking DeFi tokens.
As always we will continue to track and monitor the adoption of GasNow globally.
