TL;DR:

• The original mitigation measure has removed 99% of bot activities with empty transactions, and we will be burning the net difference in gas prices as planned
• We’ve added further mitigation measure to implement a First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) transaction ordering algorithm (Klaytn v1.8.3)
• We’ll be reducing gas price to 250 ston with the new measure in place, and carefully monitoring the impact
• Our final goal is to implement a dynamic gas price mechanism that will allow us to further reduce gas fees when network traffic is low.

It has been almost a month since Klaytn’s gas price was adjusted to combat the extreme network congestion caused by bot spam and DoS attacks. We have been actively monitoring the mitigation measures, and in our decision to adjust gas price to 750 ston, we’ve managed to remove more than 99% of bot activities associated with ​​empty transactions.

As part of our initial plans to reduce the impact of this gas price increase on Klaytn ecosystem participants, we will be burning the net difference due to the increase, to maintain the level of KLAY tokens in circulation and preserve the value for KLAY hodlers.

The burn is scheduled to take place on the first week of each month, where the amount of KLAY to be burnt will be calculated from the previous month and sent to 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dead.

In the first week of May, over 1 million KLAY from the month of April will be burnt. For transparency, the Klaytn Foundation will share the final amount of KLAY burnt and the transaction hash after each burn.

This monthly burn will be in place until the new dynamic gas fee mechanism with automated fee burning is implemented.

Further optimization measures to reduce gas price

As part of our continual efforts to optimize these mitigation measures, we’ve found a potential root cause of the network congestion. Before, there wasn’t a way to prioritize the transactions, which incentivized arbitrage bots to submit as many transactions as possible to maximize the probability of their transactions entering the block.

With the Klaytn v1.8.3 update, we’ve implemented a First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) transaction ordering algorithm that will queue transactions to be included in the block according to submission time. This should remove the reason to submit multiple transactions, and is expected to help prevent a significant amount of network congestion.

With the FCFS algorithm in place, and after a round of gathering the community’s feedback, we’ve decided to bring down the gas price to benefit the community. Hence, we will be reducing the gas price to 250 ston and carefully monitoring the impact. The gas price adjustment will be implemented on Baobab Testnet on May 12th, 2022, and Cypress Mainnet on May 22nd, 2022.

Future plans to implement dynamic gas price mechanism

As part of our long term strategy, we are also simultaneously working on a dynamic gas price mechanism with automated fee burning, in which gas price fluctuates according to network demands and any increase in gas price will be automatically burned. With a dynamic gas price mechanism in place, it will allow us to further reduce the gas fees when the network traffic is low.

You can find out more and discuss the new policy here for EN and here for KR.