The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, says that layer-2 transaction fees should be under $0.05 for it to be truly acceptable.
This was when Bankless Podcast host Ryan Sean Adams tweeted a screenshot showing the fees associated with various Ethereum L2 scaling solutions, claiming that Ethereum was inexpensive because of the low fees.
The screenshot showed fees ranged from two cents for the optimistic Layer 2 rollup Metis Network to $0.85 for the optimistic rollup Arbitrum One.
The list had Loopring at $0.12, ZKSync at $0.19, Polygon at $0.25, Boba Network at $0.48, and Optimism at $0.57.
Vitalik responded to the tweet stating the $0.05 is the Layer-2 transaction fee that he finds acceptable, and proto-danksharding might be enough to get the fee that low for the time being.
Proto Danksharding
Vitalik Buterin mentioned proto-danksharding or EIP-4844, which is a recently proposed Ethereum upgrade that will see key elements of danksharding.
It is a new and simplified design of previous sharding designs, implemented onto the network without any sharding upgrades being initiated.
“Blobs” of data, a new transaction type, would be proposed and accepted as part of EIP-4844.
The data blobs can be stored on Ethereum’s Beacon-node for a limited time and use very little disk space when not in use by the Ethereum Virtual Machine execution.
Shard chains allow data to be stored horizontally and affordably throughout a network, spreading the load, reducing congestion, and speeding up transactions. This is predicted to have a significant impact on Ethereum and its Layer-2s.
This approach might cut rollup fees by a factor of ten or more, allowing Ethereum to stay competitive without losing decentralization.
Recently, Ethereum postponed the PoS Merge to make sharding easier, allowing the chain to be split into multiple threads, which could assist Ethereum scaling solutions to quickly grow to new capacities.
However, this is unlikely to happen in the near future, hence Ethereum will rely on scaling solutions for the foreseeable future.
Buterin proposed EIP-4488 to help achieve this goal. Merge, like EIP-4844, aims to assist Ethereum scaling solutions in lowering fees even more than they already do.
Last weekend, the Ethereum fee problem was seen in one of the most hyped Otherside metaverse NFT drop, where users claimed to have paid fee upwards of $4000-$10,000 for a single transaction. Despite the issue, the Otherside mint generated $561 Million within 24 Hours.
