Polygon (MATIC) Gas Fees Rocketed Due to This Game

Bloomberg Crypto observers noticed that players of Sunflower Farmers have clogged up the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain network. Here’s how the euphoria around one game can paralyze one of the top smart contracts platforms.

Sunflower Farmers broke Polygon: Bloomberg

According to the article by Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif, a spike of in-game activity on Sunflower Farmers play-to-earn protocol on Polygon (MATIC) sent median gas fees to exorbitant levels.

An immensely popular play-to-earn crypto video game — Sunflower Farmers —is showing just how fragile and unpredictable blockchains really are https://t.co/J8R7zzWies via @technology

— Bloomberg Crypto (@crypto) January 8, 2022

As per data displayed by mainstream Polygon explorers, in the first days of 2022, gas fees on Polygon (MATIC) rallied to new historic highs.

On Jan. 1-3, Polygon gas rates increased by 600%. The most obvious catalyst of the first massive Polygon (MATIC) network collapse is the activity of the Sunflower Farmers game.

Currently, its users are sending more than two million transactions on Polygon every 24 hours. The game became the #1 gas consumer on Polygon Network, leaving USD Coin and Wrapped MATIC token contracts in the dust.

Migration to Terra, Solana in the cards?

As the game now harnesses more than 70% of Polygon’s resources, some users of dApps on the same network even proposed to launch a petition to prevent Sunflower Farms from accessing Polygon.

Can we petition @0xPolygon to shut down Sunflower Farms? People in every other Polygon project are losing money because they are causing a Denial of Service. Sorry but this cannot continue.

— PhantomJake (Phantomjake.eth) (@RealPhantomJake) January 6, 2022

As such, Polygon collapses the same way Ethereum did in 2020-2021. As covered by U.Today previously, Ethereum (ETH) was clogged by Ponzi schemes MMM Crypto and Forsage.

While some analysts claim that this is nothing but a growing pain of Polygon, developers might start considering moving their applications to other EVM-compatible blockchains.