Polygon Gas fees surge over 10 times, is the P2E game Sunflower Farmers to blame?

Author: Nianqing, Chain Catcher

If you have traded on Polygon in the past two days, you must have noticed that the Gas fees are shockingly high, and the network often lags. This is due to a P2E game called Sunflower Farmers suddenly becoming popular, causing congestion on Polygon.

According to data from PolygonScan, in the past two days, the standard Gas fees on the Polygon network have surged from about 30 Gwei to nearly 500 Gwei, with most transactions requiring at least 0.05 MATIC to successfully execute. Meanwhile, the total Gas fees on the Polygon network reached 380,000 MATIC in a single day on January 5, more than ten times the average data from the end of December.

Further investigation reveals that the smart contract of Sunflower Farmers accounts for 41.8% of the Gas consumption on the Polygon network, while the second place only accounts for 5%.

It is understood that Sunflower Farmers is a play-to-earn game launched at the end of December 2021, which incentivizes players to compete fiercely for as many token rewards as possible. The basic setup of the game is very simple, similar to the Baba Farm on Taobao, where players can purchase SFF tokens to buy seeds, plant crops, mint tools NFTs like axes, and earn tokens by continuously executing tasks such as planting and harvesting crops. The number of tokens earned varies depending on the maturity time of the crops.

In addition, the tokenomics of Sunflower Farmers stipulates that early players receive a much higher share of rewards. Over time, the token supply will quickly turn deflationary, leading to scarcity. When the supply is less than 100,000, "farmers" earn about $0.01 by harvesting a single sunflower. When the supply is between 100,000 and 500,000, "farmers" will only receive $0.002 when harvesting sunflowers.

Since it just launched, players sensing the opportunity for profit have flocked to Sunflower Farmers. Currently, Sunflower Farmers has surged to the top of the DappRadar active user rankings, surpassing popular games like Splinterlands, Alien Worlds, and Axie Infinity. The Polygon network is also struggling to withstand the gaming heat of Sunflower Farmers, with Gas fees continuing to rise.

Many players have complained on its official Twitter about transactions being stuck for hours, being unable to complete trades even with increased Gas fees, Gas fees being higher than earnings, and issues with game saves. Currently, neither Sunflower Farmers nor Polygon has responded to the network congestion issues.

The high Gas fees have also caused trouble for other DApps on the Polygon network. For example, the NFT rental protocol Double Protocol has announced a delay for its Alpha Pass, which was originally scheduled to launch today.

Currently, there are two main possible reasons for the congestion on the Polygon network. One is that some users suspect that the smart contract of Sunflower Farmers is inefficient and written with low-efficiency code.

Additionally, security analyst Thomas Kerbl pointed out on Twitter that another reason is that this incentivized farming game may have attracted "a large number of bots trying to extract value," which can run multiple farms simultaneously and operate much faster. DappRadar data shows that Sunflower Farmers processed about 1.1 million transactions from over 330,000 addresses on the latest day. Furthermore, there is another voice suggesting that this severe congestion may have been caused by a DDoS attack.

It is reported that the congestion on Polygon has lasted nearly three days. The price of the Sunflower Farmers token SFF has continued to decline after reaching a peak of $5.28 on January 4, and is currently around $1.

According to the roadmap provided by the Sunflower Farmers official website, the project has three main visions for this year: 1. To become the number one open-source play-to-earn game; 2. To launch a crowdsourced production mechanism; 3. To stabilize token prices and reward long-term farmers. Currently, the first vision has basically been achieved (ranked by total users), but how long can this game sustain?

From the perspective of the token economic model, the project team locks the tokens in the farm for a period of time by planting crops, then waits for new players and new demand to enter. Early players have indeed made real money, with some early players entering at $0.005 and exiting at $5.

However, as fewer new players enter, this model will collapse, and those who enter later will earn less. The economic model of such games is essentially unsustainable, and analysts predict that the popularity of Sunflower Farmers may not last more than two weeks.

Previously, the Solana public chain also faced multiple instances of on-chain congestion due to DDoS attacks. This time, Polygon has encountered a similar situation, negatively impacting the on-chain operation experience for ordinary users, indicating that these public chains known for their performance or scalability solutions still face challenges such as inefficiency and congestion caused by high concurrency. They need to propose better solutions to cope with frequent attacks of this kind.