Ethereum miners increase network capacity by 20% in response to congestion

Miners have expanded the gas limit on Ethereum by 20 percent over the last 10 days, helping address congestion and highlighting an innovative network capability.

Over the last quarter, Ethereum has been plagued with congestion as network utilization began to regularly exceed 90 percent.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin even remarked the "Blockchain is almost full" in a comment about network scalability.

Gas represents how much work, in terms of computational resources, a transaction takes on the Ethereum network.

Miners are able to vote to raise the gas limit, announced Vitalik Buterin, and were already doing so in response to network congestion.

Unlike Bitcoin, which has a fixed block size limit of 1 megabyte, Ethereum miners can vote to raise the gas limit by 1/1024 every block, allowing the network to gradually accommodate demand.

In short, the voting process allows the network to scale itself to accommodate greater network demand, allowing miners to help the community come to consensus-and preventing potentially disastrous hard forks around block size.

Some members of the Ethereum community have argued that miners controlling the gas limit represents a form a centralization.

The primary source of additional strain on the network appears to stem from Tether's migration over to the Ethereum network.

Other notable congestors include ChainLink and IDEX. Overall, it seems the network is scaling as intended, allowing Ethereum miners to choose when it's economically sensible to increase the capacity of the network.