Transaction congestion harming second-layer solutions

Although a small operator, the CasinoFair situation should serve as a stark warning to others looking to build atop a general-purpose base layer. Due to congestion and high gas fees their solution effectively became unusable. They were born in the boom of 2017, along with a large number of other similar solutions who often raised large amounts of funds and now have little to show for it.

While being much easier to implement, these second-layer solutions inherit a wide range of potential issues. While the majority of these issues are only inconveniences, some are enough to render the solution completely inoperable as we see here. Even the smaller issues can really start to add up however, keeping up with a large general-purpose network like Ethereum imposes a lot of long-term extraneous costs for operators. Not just Ethereum, networks such as EOS have proven unusable for gambling solutions like Earnbet who suspended their services in late 2019 detailed here. The base layer can also introduce vulnerabilities leading to large losses for the dApp, as seen here with EOSPlay losing over 30,000 EOS due to an EOSIO exploit.

The gambling industry in particular is where application-specific solutions can really shine. Without the burden of all of the unnecessary overhead they are free to explore and implement elements that are most beneficial to both bettors and operators. The savings are passed on too, in the form of lower fees and higher rewards.