Polygon co-founder explains how to stop articles from network crashes.

Digital aggregators created by writing information into the call data or token field of a blockchain transaction have degraded performance or even crashed many blockchain networks, including Arbitrum, zkSync, Avalanche, and others. But Polygon co-founder Brandon Farmer says that parallel Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVMs) could solve the problem once and for all.

Articles were originally created on the Bitcoin network. After the Taproot update in 2021, Bitcoin users discovered that the update allowed them to add information to the “witness” transaction field, allowing images, tokens, and other digital collections to be published on the Bitcoin blockchain. Some users see the new collections as a benefit to the network, while others see them as “spam”.

But the madness didn't stop with Bitcoin. Soon, developers started creating on Ethereum sidechains and layer-2s such as Arbitrum, Avalanche and Polygon. Instead of writing in the Bitcoin transaction credential field, this new type of text is written in the “calldata” field of the EVM-based network. Because call data is not stored in the smart contract state, this allowed manufacturers to create their own set at a fraction of the cost of developing a traditional non-vulnerable token (NFT).

However, this cheap mining method eventually led to high fees and instability for many blockchain networks due to users flooding the network with text transactions. On December 15th, Ethereum Layer-2 went offline for more than 70 minutes after spam was created by Abitrim. In December, half a dozen other blockchains experienced underperformance or extremely high payouts due to these minor effects.

Scripts have taken down several chains in the past two days and caused massive gas crunches.

However, very few people really understand what is going on.

Here's a simple explanation of scripts – how they work and why they're spamming everywhere: pic.twitter.com/IjQ6wuypRX

— Cygaar (@0xCygaar) December 18, 2023

In a chat with Cointelegraph, the farmer said that parallel EVMs can help solve this problem. In his view, parallelism allows unrelated transactions to be processed faster, increase blockchain throughput and contain spam.

“Generally, EVM is done sequentially, so every transaction in a block has to be done sequentially,” said Farmer. “It doesn't matter whether it's an NFT transaction or a Uniswap transaction, two things that are not dependent on each other, we process those transactions in sequence.”

However, with a parallel EVM, unrelated transactions can be processed simultaneously rather than sequentially. “At the same time, we can handle your Uniswap transactions and your writing and your NFT mint,” Farmer said.

This ability to process two or more transactions simultaneously allows the network to “process gas payments in conflicting environments.”

For example, if many different people are trying to use Uniswap at the same time, they may incur higher fees because their transactions are interrelated and must be processed sequentially. However, other users trying to mine NFTs are mostly unaffected by this use of Uniswap. On the other hand, if the network experiences a lot of micro-patterns, this can increase the cost of subscriptions, leaving other users mostly unaffected.

According to the farmer, this feature of “local gas payment” has not yet been implemented on the polygon, but eventually it is one of the goals.

Another benefit of parallelism is the overall increase in output, said Farmer. The Polygon team has already implemented “Block-STM”, which is the “first step” to parallelization. And even with this small step, they saw “a 1.6x improvement in performance” and “none”. [have] Achieved or will soon achieve 2x improvement. This means allowing the nodes to synchronize with the network and allow them to run twice as fast, giving the network an added ability to handle spam.

Related: Polygon 2.0: 2024 to see integrated ZK-powered L2 chains

According to Farmer, parallelism was originally proposed by Solana developers, but the idea is now being implemented on many blockchains to improve its performance, including not only Polygon, but Aptos, Monad and others. But the Ethereum ecosystem is taking a new approach to this concept, combining parallelism with spatial augmentation, including Polygon 2.0.