Polygon is raising Gas price to counter spam transactions

TL;DR Breakdown:

• Polygon is increasing the minimum gas fee from one Gwei to 30 Gwei. 
• The new development comes as part of the measure to reduce spam activities on the network. 

Leading Ethereum-based scalability network, Polygon is planning to increase the minimum gas price as a measure to counter against pointless transactions on the network. The announcement comes as active users and network activities on the network continue to increase, with transactions surpassing that of the base blockchain Ethereum. 

Polygon to increase gas fee to 30Gwei

Following the announcement made by Software Engineering Lead Sandeep Sreenath, the minimum gas fee for transactions on the Polygon Network will be increased from 1Gwei to 30Gwei, to reduce the number of spam transactions logged on the network.

Recall in June, Polygon dealt with a spam attack where the attacker(s) flooded the network with lots of empty transactions, which the attackers sent to themselves. Thus, raising the minimum gas fee could be just an extra layer of security needed to prevent more of those spam activities since it will become more expensive to perform. 

Even at 30Gwei, the dollar value of the fee is still cheaper compared to that of Ethereum and it should keep the network relatively clean as it prepares for a new wave of adoption, especially from the non-fungible token (NFT) market. 

Polygon adoption

Formerly known as Matic Network, Polygon has become the most popular scalability solution on the Ethereum blockchain. Amid its faster and cheaper transactions, lots of Ethereum protocols and users have migrated to the network to save resources. Recently, the number of unique daily addresses on the network surpassed that of Ethereum, which has now become expensive for small transactions.

Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea is one of the recent projects to join the network. Due to the low transaction fees, Opensea is able to offer free transactions. In September alone, about 49% of transactions on OpenSea were made through the scalability network.