Sunflower Farmers Hits the Polygon Network Where it Hurts: Gas Fees

Sunflower Farmers, a farming play-to-earn game, recently launched on the polygon network and have since surpassed and failed expectations at the same time.  It’s common for users to complain about high Ethereum gas fees. But it’s almost an anomaly to hear users cry out about high gas fees or network congestion on the Polygon network. 

Sunflower Farmers Causes Congestion on the Polygon Network

Recently, users of the Polygon network sent complaints on gas fees and transaction delays on the polygon network. The problem was later traced to the Sunflower Farmers game, which experienced many users trying to partake and earn rewards. 

On January 6th, Wu blockchain reportedstated that the NFT gaming space was gulping well above 40% of the Polygon network’s gas. Sunflower Farmers had 281,062 holders at that time, while the top holder with 850,045.345498411066728381 SFF tokens was zapping the most significant portion of the network’s gas.

The tokenomics of the Sunflower Farmers game are designed so that as more people join the game, the overall supply increases, and the rewards decrease. 

This means that someone playing in the early days will receive significantly more rewards for harvesting a sunflower than late joiners. This scheme led to high participation, which attacked the Polygon network.

Sunflower Farmers had over 459K users last week, according to DappRadar. They ranked second during that same period, just behind Splinterlands’ 514K users. This is a large number of users, and it is reported that the majority of them are bots. In the race to earn more rewards, bots are used to create random accounts controlled programmatically to earn more rewards. Also, the project developers deemed it fit to store the history of each player’s game on the network every 25 minutes. All these led to congestion on the Polygon network and a peak in transaction fees.

Current Status

The Sunflower Farmers project has released a statement on their website, which reads:

What started as a side project by a group of friends ended up becoming something we never could have anticipated.

It grew so quickly and unfortunately, the game was abused by malicious actors to the point where it was difficult for people to play. Now that we have this amazing community, we feel it is our duty to build a game that will be sustainable for the years to come. In order to do so, we are in the progress of making some much-needed upgrades.

Amongst these upgrades include anti-botting mechanisms, efficient gas prices, secure smart contracts, and of course, more gameplay.

It is understood that the team has realized and noted the loopholes in the project and is working towards building something better. According to further reports found on their website, a new contract will be released in which all tokens and items collected in the game will be transferred into the new Sunflower Land ecosystem. Snapshot has been taken, and all data will be transferred when the new contract is released. 

The game has now been put in maintenance mode until the team fixes the issues. The game will be relaunched under the name Sunflower Land. You can read more about the future roadmap here.

The Sunflower Farmers streamed an AMA session on January 7th to address the current state of the game and to address the future of the project.

Many traders, crypto investors, and developers have switched to Polygon to escape the gruesome gas fees on the Ethereum network. It would thus be interesting to see how this eventually pans out. If the Polygon network increasingly gets stormed by more gas gulping games such as Sunflower Farmers, it could sabotage their current reputation as a gas fee-friendly blockchain for users.

What is Sunflower Farmers?

Sunflower Farmers is a Play-to-Earn NFT farming game launched on the polygon network. In the quest for building farming empires in the game, players are required to plant, mine, craft, fish, fight, and perform more tasks.

Players can earn Sunflower Farm tokens by planting and harvesting crops. For example, you can purchase sunflower seeds for $0.0002 SFF, harvest them, and sell them for $0.0004 SFF. Not just sunflowers, but potatoes, pumpkin, cauliflower, radish, and other vegetables, are available for farming. SFF is the native token of the Sunflower Farmers project.

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