Polygon Leads in Inscriptions as Co-Founder Criticizes Avalanche Gas

Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal revealed in a recent post on X that the blockchain recorded over 161 million inscriptions. The inscription statistics shared by the co-founder place BNB in the second spot with 77 million inscriptions and Avalanche follows with 60 million.

Nailwal shared, “Highest number of inscriptions on @0xPolygon POS, 161m. More than 2X the amount of inscriptions on the second-ranked chain for inscriptions.”

Inscriptions, akin to Ordinals on Bitcoin, serve as data embeds much like smart-contract-based ERC20 tokens and NFTs.

In the post, Nailwal made a pointed remark about rivals, particularly Avalanche, highlighting that gas fees on Polygon remained under 10 cents. In contrast, he noted, the fees on other networks soared to $400. “We hit a peak of 18 million transactions in one day,” he added.

The co-founder also likened the gas fee uptick during peak activity to a horror story.

Data from the DUNE dashboard reveals Avalanche’s substantial gas fees. The percentage of gas spent on inscriptions is highest for Goerli at 91%, followed by Avalanche at 68.5%, in the past 24 hours.

Transaction activity on December 19 showed gas spent inscripting on Avalanche topped $150,000, while Polygon’s fees were a mere $29.

A prior tweet from Trader Joe’s co-founder Cryptofishx on X pointed to BEEG minting as the cause of the gas fee increase. BEEG is a DeFi token on Avalanche. Cryptofishx’s tweet read, “I was thinking we might take weeks to mint out but looks like we’ll get there much sooner. The sooner the better so gas prices can get back to where they originally were.”

Impeccable timing pic.twitter.com/tolVPFeVKR

— Daeshawn.sol | 👨🏾‍💻☁️🎮 (@DaeshawnBallard) December 18, 2023

Meanwhile, Avalanche’s market trend appears upbeat, according to Token Terminal data. At the time of writing, its price has exceeded $40, marking a significant increase across time frames.

There’s a surge in daily active users and revenue. However, this heightened activity brings about network issues, evident in rising fees and congestion. Therefore, it looks like scalability solutions will take the front seat with EVM chains going forward.