Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has given another serious thought to trying to improve the current network fee structure.
Titled "Multidimensional EIP-1559," Buterin noted in a Jan. 5 blog post that different resources in the ethereum virtual machine (EVM) have different needs in terms of gas usage.
He added that short-term “burst” capacity has different constraints compared to “sustained” capacity within the EVM, such as block data storage, witness data storage, and block state size changes.
"Our solutions today, which combine all resources into a single multidimensional resource ('gas'), do a poor job of handling these differences."
The problem, he added, is that directing all the different resources into a single resource leads to "very suboptimal gas costs" when those limits are inconsistent.
Buterin outlined his rather complex changes with a lot of technical mathematics, but in short, the proposal offers two potential solutions using "multidimensional" pricing.
The first option is to divide the base fee per unit of resource by the total base fee to calculate the gas cost of invoking resources such as data and storage. The base fee is a fixed network fee per block included in the EIP-1559 algorithm.
A second, more complex scenario is to set a base fee for resource usage, but include a burst limit on each resource. There will also be a "priority fee", which is set as a percentage and calculated by multiplying the percentage by the base fee.
The downside of the multidimensional fee structure, he said, is that “block builders won’t be able to simply accept transactions in order of highest to lowest gas fees.” They will have to balance the dimensions and solve additional math.
It remains to be seen whether the proposal will pass, as the current focus is on the next major upgrade. The ethereum network is currently preparing for a "merge," which would see the ethereum blockchain docked with the beacon chain and effectively end proof-of-work. Testing is already underway on the Kintsugi testnet and full deployment is expected in the first quarter of this year.
As part of the London upgrade, EIP-1559 was deployed in August to burn some transaction fees and thus make gas pricing more predictable. Since it went live, 1.36 million ETH has been destroyed, worth about $4.7 billion at current prices, according to burn tracking data.
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