It’s Q4 of 2021 (28th Oct), and Ethereum’s gas fees are currently raging at $17USD / transaction. If you catch the right, off-peak hours such as Saturday evenings GMT +8, you could get it cheaper at $2.30USD. The problem is: will your profitable trade wait till Saturday evenings? This brings us back to our original problem. What is the current state of development of our Layer 2 solutions? Layer 2 solutions manifesting on Uniswap as network options (31 Oct 2021) TLDR: Arbitrum is the only successful implementation of L2 solution at scale. Other projects, such as Optimism, and zkSync, are either operating at curtailed scale, or are still in development/testing Gas fees are still not ridiculously cheap for now. If broke, use Polygon. Let us first begin by considering Polygon. In my previous post two months ago (13 Aug 21), we saw that Polygon was the third largest network with 5.66Bn TLV. It’s widely heralded as a low cost alternative to Eth, with transaction costs going down to $0.00005USD and a TPS of ~88. Since then, much has changed. Not only has other projects such as Solana, Terra, Avalanche, and Fantom overtaken it in terms of TVL, Polygon’s TVL has actually declined over the period. ...

As of 13 Aug 2021, Polygon is the third largest blockchain with $5.66Bn TVL with 46 protocols running on it. Source: Defi Llama &nbsp Even though it is growing rapidly, it is still 19 times smaller than market leader Ethereum, and about a third the size of Binance Smart Chain. Source: Defi Llama &nbsp Polygon has always been attractive to developers and protocols due to its commitment to extremely cheap gas fees. To put things into perspective, the cheapest transaction on Ethereum costs roughly around $2USD these days (if you’re lucky); whereas on Polygon network, it costs $0.0005USD. Yes, that is 0.05 cents, in other words, 4000x cheaper. ...