Ethereum Token You’ve Never Heard of is Hogging 10% of the Network’s Gas

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A Reddit user has complained that a virtually unknown token is consuming a large amount of Ethereum’s gas supply.

Gas is a measurement of the computational work required to do a given transaction on the Ethereum network. Different smart contracts have different requirements. It is not exactly the same as a transaction fee but it can be viewed as such in terms of economics – when more gas is required, a transaction is, therefore, more expensive. When many transactions are being executed at once, the resources of the network are therefore scarcer, and gas becomes more costly.

A website dedicated to tracking the biggest gas hogs in Ethereum confirms that this contract is using the most gas on the network at present time.

The trouble is, Omniscience Dedication Financial is essentially an unknown quantity. A Mumbai company called Omniscience Capital is found when you search the term, but they have no mention of blockchain products on their site.

What Is Going On Here?

Nothing of value is returned on either Bing or Google. Whoever they are, they’re busy, having conducted more than 72000 transactions within the contract at time of writing. ODF tokens are moving, but it’s unclear what they do, who they are for, or why they exist. The creator of the contract, also unknown, has transacted primarily in two tokens: ODF and CKC, neither of which is assigned a value on venerable site Etherscan. CKC has just 15 holders total.

The ODF token is not currently trading on EtherDelta, which will typically list any token at all. If there were any demand for the token, it’d be trading there, certainly.

All of which begs the question: what is this all about? What is going on here? Are we soon to be surprised by a new “financial” token with some important use case hitting the market and having thousands of holders? Is this the work of a fund or firm working strictly for its clients?

The nature of the public Ethereum blockchain is that anyone can create and launch a token if they please, provided they’re willing to pay for the computing used. In the case of ODF, they appear to have no issue paying for gas, to the detriment of some everyday users. CCN will monitor the situation and report as more details eventually become available on the situation.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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