Polygon Hikes its Minimum Gas Price by 30x in Bid to Foil Spammers

Polygon, the sixth-largest blockchain by assets locked, is increasing the minimum gas price for transactions on its network by a factor of 30.

The move comes as the network recently surpassed Ethereum in terms of Daily Active Addresses and is intended to reduce the number of spam transactions on the network.

There have been increasing numbers of spam transactions reported since the explosion in DeFi activity on the network earlier this year. In one curious case, a user was found to be repeatedly sending zero value transactions to themselves.

Polygon co-founder Jaynti Kanani confirmed the hike and said the change affects validators of the network.

“They can set it to whatever minimum gas fee they want,” he told The Defiant. “No consensus change is needed. This is true for Ethereum nodes as well ?”

Too Drastic

Nearly all of the responses to the forum post disagreed with the decision.

Some community members opined that the hike was too drastic given that the network has not been overly congested recently.

Arbitrary Decision

Others took issue with the manner in which the decision was taken, pointing to the centralization of power held Polygon team’s hands.

While Polygon will continue to offer the cheapest transactions among the major DeFi chains at $0.002, even after the fee hike, the gap is closing between it and competing low-cost blockchains like Solana, Fantom and Arbitrum, whose transactions have an average cost of $0.001, $0.05 and $0.10 respectively.

From the chart above, we can see that gas prices on Polygon have averaged around 30 gwei recently, which may have factored into the team’s choice of the new minimum fee.