Gavin Wood Advocates For Fee-Free Cryptocurrency Transactions In Web3

According to Cointelegraph, Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot, and Kusama, envisions a future where Web3 technology and cryptocurrency serve as socially beneficial public goods. Wood believes that for Web3 to achieve its full potential, cryptocurrency transactions should be free of transaction fees. In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Wood expressed his hope for a fee-free Web3, stating, 'My biggest hope is that we can really make [Web3] free for everyone.' A significant part of his efforts includes the upcoming tattoo-based Web3 individuality solution, Proof-of-Ink, aimed at making crypto and Web3 accessible worldwide. Wood revealed that he and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin initially considered eliminating the Ether (ETH) token from the Ethereum ecosystem back in 2013. 'Vitalik and I were talking about the possibility of basically getting rid of Ether, the currency. Something that now appears to be unthinkable,' Wood said. However, they ultimately decided to retain Ether as an efficient anti-spam mechanism and a means of raising funds for further innovation. Despite Ether's status as the second-largest cryptocurrency, Wood emphasized the need to separate it from the Ethereum network to onboard the six billion Web2 users to the Web3 space. 'It will be hard to divorce Ethereum from Ether in an effective way that makes it sufficiently responsive to the sort of applications that we will need to produce and deploy on Web3 to bring over the 6 billion people using Web2 services daily,' he explained. Wood highlighted Polkadot's JAM chain as a step toward achieving nearly free cryptocurrency transactions. JAM aims to make blockchain transaction fees nearly free, but Wood believes a more permanent solution lies in Web3 individuality, which would eliminate the need for an anti-spam mechanism and, consequently, transaction fees.