The estimated price of gas in the Ethereum network has increased substantially, a problem that seems to be affecting the Geth and Parity nodes. To protect themselves from prohibitively high gas prices, users have been advised to manually reduce their gas estimates.

Crypto never sleeps. That's why, on Saturday night, ETHNews spoke with Griff Green, Founder of Giveth and co-founder of White Hat Group. Green warned that the estimated prices of gas in the Ethereum network have increased dramatically, a problem that others noticed, such as Bittrex.

"There are some really rare transactions in the group of transactions that are raising the estimated price of gas for everyone," Green said. "As the estimated price of the gas increases, everyone continues to use it and, basically, it is getting out of control slowly," he explained.

At the time of writing these lines (blocks 4,866,737 to 4,866,739), average gas prices were 119.93 Gwei, 128.33 Gwei and 128.77 Gwei, respectively.

For comparison purposes, for the blocks 4,854,277 to 4,854,279 two days ago, average gas prices were 32.53 Gwei, 33.79 Gwei and 32.39 Gwei respectively.

According to Green, some transactions seem to be stuck in the group of pending transactions and it seems that the estimated price of gas is artificially increasing. Below is a small sample. Consider how long some of these transactions have been in the pending group, and their exorbitantly high gas prices.

Bittrex, for example, could have been sensible about it from the beginning, publishing on Thursday that Ether's assets were "offline" due to a "performance problem" with Geth. Late on Friday night, the exchange decided to suspend "the creation of new ETH addresses and asset deposits."

For now, Green suggested that users manually reduce their estimated gas prices to alleviate the problem.

UPVOTE & FOLLOW @enrikeprez