High Ethereum gas prices are the new normal, and they’ve rendered many tokenized virtual economies infeasible.

In order to thrive in a high-gas Ethereum network, it was important for us to refocus on our core technology. This is a short story about ImmutableSoft, a nonprofit in this space, as we journeyed to reinvent our Dapp so it would be positioned to thrive in the face of high gas costs.

The Ethereum community shouldn’t be expected to lower gas prices because this isn’t in their best interest. High gas prices create demand for their product, ETH. Realizing this allows one to move forward and plan for high gas prices as the new normal.

The first step we took was to move our ERC20 token to an ERC777 token, eliminating the approve transaction for each transfer. This wasn’t enough. Next, we eliminated our ERC20 token entirely. Philosophically this was a difficult decision to make. Much of the philanthropy of our nonprofit was tied into allowing other nonprofits to earn tokens. Our referral program also had to be scrapped, as there are now no tokens to reward. Without a token, the default Ecosystem monetization now uses ETH instead of a utility token, eliminating complexity and reducing gas costs.

Every transaction to a smart contract incurs gas costs associated with the transfer of ETH, regardless of whether ETH was transferred or not. In a high-gas world, it’s advisable to take advantage of this.

The best side effect of eliminating our ERC20 token, however, was on the legal front. With no more SEC to worry about, our need to gather intrusive KYC data on users evaporated. Also of high importance, the move from a native token to ETH exposed our core technology. Immutable software release, distribution, and activation sales are now at the forefront of our message, without the complicating umbrella of using a novel token. We now find it easier to communicate our core technology to others, solidifying this change as a positive improvement overall.

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