Buterin highlighted his concerns about the high transaction fees on Level 1 blockchains for rollups and the considerable time required to implement and deploy data fragmentation.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin made an interesting proposal this weekend to reduce the cost of Ethereum’s high network fees: a cap on data consumption per block.
In a post on the Ethereum Wizards forum, Buterin highlighted his concerns about the high transaction fees on Level 1 blockchains for rollups and the considerable time required to implement and deploy data fragmentation.
Although the young man born in Kolomna, Russia, cited an alternative where the gas cost parameters could be lowered without adding an additional limit to the block size, he foresees a security issue in lowering the calldata gas cost from 16 to 3, as this would “increase the maximum block size to 10M bytes and bring Ethereum’s p2p network layer to unprecedented levels of stress, with the risk of breaking the network”.
In this regard, the Ethereum co-founder issued a proposal for a lower cost and size, which aims to achieve the goal of reducing unprecedented levels of stress and the risk of network breakage: “1.5MB will be sufficient and will avoid most security risks.” He added: “We need to rethink the historical opposition to multidimensional resource limits and see them as a pragmatic way of simultaneously achieving moderate scalability gains while maintaining security.”
Experts agree that if such a limit is implemented, it could lead to a reduction of up to eight times current tariffs.
If accepted, implementation of the proposal will require a scheduled network upgrade, resulting in a historically incompatible gas revaluation for the Ethereum ecosystem. The upgrade also means that miners will have to comply with a new rule that prevents new transactions from being added to a block when the total calldata size reaches the maximum. “In the worst-case scenario, the theoretical long-term maximum would be ~1,262,861 bytes per 12 seconds, or ~3.0 TB per year,” reads Vitalik’s proposal.
On the bangs of the debate, the community is debating other options such as the implementation of a soft cap, while others are concerned about congestion during non-fungible token sales (NFT), which could force users to compensate for the lack of execution gas by paying higher total fees.
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