Since June, the second-leading crypto asset, ethereum, has faced high transaction fees. Today’s average fee for an ethereum transfer is $54 to $34. While there’s been a lot of complaints about ether gas costs this year, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has recommended an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) that aims to decrease transaction costs by five times. Ethereum developer Tim Beiko discussed the idea as well, and talked about possible “challenges” both long and short term.
Moving Ether, Transferring an ERC20, and Swapping Tokens on Ethereum Is Costly — Tim Beiko Shares EIP-4488 Insights
It was expected that EIP-1559, which relieved at least some of this pressure after the London upgrade in the first week. The average transaction fee for a transfer to the network continued rising after London’s upgrade, reaching $62 on November 9. The average cost of ethergas is much lower today. Bitinfocharts.com reports that the average ether fee per transfer is 0.0883ETH, which is $34.09. According to l2fees.info, an ETH transaction costs as little as $5.77, while moving an ERC20 can cost $13.20. Swapping ETH-based tokens could cost as much as $28.27 each swap.
Bitcoin.com News covered the debates between Avalanche and Ethereum supporters on cryptocurrency forums and social media platforms, such as Twitter. Ethereum is facing stiff competition from blockchains such as Binance Smart Chain and Terra. Developers are now being pushed to do more about high gas prices by the higher fees. Tim Beiko (ETHINK DEVELOPER) was interviewed November 26th. sharedThe most recent discussion with developers was about a plan to reduce the cost of rollups.
Vitalik Buterin (ETHINK) has proposed leveraging the EIP-48888 idea to lower gas costs. “Decrease transaction calldata gas cost, and add a limit of how much total transaction calldata can be in a block,” Buterin suggested on Github on November 24. The idea is to reduce the data transaction cost significantly. estimatesSay that gas costs could be cut by up to five times. EIP-4488 leverages a scheme called “calldata,” which is utilized in L2 (layer 2) solutions such as Optimistic and ZK rollups. Beiko spoke about this possible solution Friday on Twitter.
“The cost of rollup txns is a function of the data they post back to the Ethereum mainnet,” Beiko said. “If a rollup compresses X transactions and pays Y gas fees to commit it to mainnet, the cost of rollup transactions is a function of Y/X. Calldata is added to rollup transactions. It currently costs 16 gas per byte. If we reduce the calldata cost, then we reduce the cost of rollup transactions,” the programmer added. Beiko further stated that one of the challenges to the calldata solution is that it “influences the block sizes on Ethereum.” Beiko continued:
It’s literally data we add to each transaction. We can have larger blocks if we reduce the gas cost and maintain the same limit. This is both short- and long-term problematic. It increases worst-case block size in the short term. If, for example, calldata was 1 gas/byte, with a 30m gas block, you’d get a 30MB block (average right now is
EIP-4444/EIP-4490 and the Upcoming Arrow Glacier upgrade
Ethereum (ETH!) users currently are either not transacting with the ether or leveraging high-priced L1 (layer 1) network fees. Or they use rollup layer solution. Loopring is able to transmit ethereum for $0.25 each, which can make L2 options much less expensive than L1 costs. Polygon Hermez is $0.25; Zksync costs around $0.27 and Optimism is currently $2.39. Transferring with Arbitrum One costs $2.43. Beiko’s thread noted that L1 fees were high but L2 fees were also fairly expensive as well.
“Fees on Ethereum are *high* and also aren’t trivial on rollups today (~3-4$ for a ETH send on ORs and ~0.25c on ZKRs), so it’s worth thinking about the tradeoff more,” Beiko said. EIP-48888 was mentioned by the software programmer. EIP-44444 (Bound Historic Data in Execution clients) was also mentioned. “Clients must stop serving historical headers, bodies, and receipts older than one year on the p2p layer,” the EIP-4444 description says. Abstract summary of EIP-44444 adds:
Clients may locally prune this historical data — This change will result in less bandwidth usage on the network as clients adopt more lightweight sync strategies based on the PoS weak subjectivity assumption.
The Ethereum developer’s Twitter thread also told people about the upcoming December 8th Arrow Glacier upgrade, which aims to postpone the network’s difficulty bomb. While open-source programmers prepare to address the network’s issues, alternative blockchain networks continue to advance on Ethereum’s heels.
What do you think about the recent solutions proposed to address the Ethereum network’s high transfer costs? Comment below and let us know how you feel about the subject.
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