Cryptocurrency-based publishing platform Publish0x has announced a delay to withdrawals for authors, citing spiking Ethereum fees.
In an announcement this week, the Publish0x team announced a delay in the weekly withdrawals of earnings to its various authors due to the surging fees on the Ethereum network:
"When we first started Publish0x, gas prices were 6 gwei. It cost us $10-20 to pay out 2000 people.
Today gas prices hit an all time high of over 460 gwei, nearly 100x the cost. We're looking at $2,000+ cost for a payout at current gas prices. This is obviously not economically viable.
We hope you understand that we need to wait for this to cool down. At the latest it will be 1 extra week - a 1 week delay, but if gas prices drop to more reasonable levels we will pay out sooner - into the future we think we will have to move to payouts only every 2 weeks, but we'll keep you posted on that."
Publish0x is a blogging platform with around a million monthly viewers that collects pools of tips donated by projects and allows users to distribute them to authors, with the users keeping a portion of the tip.
The tokens that users receive in tips on Publish0x include Basic Attention Token, Loopring, and Ethereum. All of these require gas, or bits of Ethereum for fees, in order to move.
Ethereum's extensive token ecosystem relies on a (de)central point of failure
Ethereum's extensive network effect of tokens running on its platform nonetheless represents a scaling weak point based on the network's ability to cheaply process transactions. At time of writing the median transaction fee and average transaction fee for Ethereum are, respectively, $8.67 and $14.87. These fees must be paid in order to move Ethereum-based tokens.
According to CoinGecko, a full 51 of the top 100-ranked crypto assets by market cap are based on Ethereum. This means that over half of the top crypto market is directly affected by fee spikes on the Ethereum network.
Scaling hopes rely on a successful Ethereum 2.0 launch
The ability for the Ethereum network to scale to handle high volumes of usage largely depend on the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade, a shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus. This would theoretically enable the network to field a much higher number of on-chain transactions. This upgrade is expected to begin rollout this month and continue over the next several years.
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