High gas fees complaints are not new in the Ethereum blockchain and it is not very helpful for users running their programs on it. However, this week has good news for Ethereum fans as Vitalik Buterin proposes a new EIP-4488 that will help lower the gas fees. According to Buterin, the new Ethereum improvement proposal aims to limit the overall transaction calldata and, in return, reduce the gas costs on the Ethereum network.
The supply and demand of Ethereum significantly affect the gas prices on the network. Only 15 transactions can be processed on the ETH network, which creates congestion on the blockchain and, thus, high fees. For instance, earlier this November, the gas fees for Ethereum had reached a new high of $62 per transaction due to increased activities on the network. Based on BitInfoCharts, Ethereum gas fees are currently at $44.
After considering the high gas fees concerns, Etherium co-founder proposed EIP-4488 as a short term solution for the transaction fees as developers work on a long term solution for eliminating layer 2 gas fees. Although EIP-4488 will reduce transactional costs with no need to increase the block size, Buterin posed a security concern associated with the calldata limitation from 16 to 3.
“Simply decreasing the calldata gas cost from 16 to 3 would increase the maximum block size to 10M bytes. This would push the Ethereum p2p [peer-to-peer] networking layer to unprecedented levels of strain and risk breaking the network; some previous live tests of ~500 kB blocks a few years ago had already taken down a few bootstrap nodes,” Buterin said.
In his post, Buterin commented on the “decrease-cost-and-cap proposal” he issued that aims at tackling securing concerns on the Ethereum network. He believes that the increase on the maximum block size to 1.5MB is sufficient and low risk. According to BitMEX, the proposal could reduce the number of transactions fees by five times. The industry research firm reported on Tweeter and said:
“Looks like Ethereum may soon effectively have a 1MB blocksize limit! This is part of the process to lower the gas cost of data by around 5 times, to make rollups cheaper”.
If the EIP-4488 goes through, a scheduled network upgrade will be required for implementation, resulting in a backward repricing for the ETH ecosystem. However, that would not be the only implication of the update. Miners are concerned that they will not add any transactions when the calldata reaches its maximum. Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko said the challenge with the proposed solution would be its impact on the block size. Alex Krusz, another Ethereum developer, emphasized the extensive implications of EIP-4488 on the Etherrium Network. The community is also concerned about congestion during NFT sales that could require them to pay higher fees due to a lack of execution fees.
Ethereum high fees have seen the outflow of users from the network. This could translate that it is not solving the problems it was created to solve. Hopefully, the new updates on the network will help it shift to the “Proof of Stake” model and gain scalability globally.
