Ethereum
Will Vitalik Buterin’s Gas Fee Proposal Make Ethereum More Like Solana?
Ethereum could use a much better system for charging transaction fees to its users, the network’s chief architect, Vitalik Buterin, argued in a statement. widely distributed trial published Thursday.
Buterin’s message, which paved the way for a more personalized and equitable system, immediately sparked reactions from two main groups: Ethereum users, who expressed excitement at the prospect of reduced fares on the network’s expensive mainline; And Solana users and developers, who noticed that Buterin’s proposal closely resembled the pricing model of the Solana network.
“It’s definitely a Solana-like approach,” Mert Mumtaz, a prominent Solana builder and co-founder and CEO of an infrastructure startup. Helius Laboratoriessaid Decrypt.
So how similar is Buterin’s “multi-dimensional gas fee” proposal to Solana’s “local fee markets”?
Gas fees refer to the transaction costs that blockchain users pay to the network. This system is in many ways what gives tokens like Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) their value. You need ETH to pay for gas if you want to do just about anything on the Ethereum network, just like you need SOL to do things on Solana. When there is a lot of activity on the network, gas prices increase. And when there’s less activity, gas costs go down.
In some ways, Solana’s current gas fee structure and Vitalik’s “multi-dimensional gas fee” proposal stem from the same philosophy: in the name of fairness, different types of on-chain transactions should cost different amounts, depending on demand. But in practice, the leaders of the two networks appear to have different ideas on how to implement such a philosophy, leading to a potentially significant difference in user experience.
Solana currently operates on a “local fresh markets” structure, in which gas costs are calculated per account, project by project. Under this system, gas price increases due to network congestion are effectively reserved for specific projects.
For example, an increase in gas fees induced by a hot Solana NFT mint should only impact users who interact with that project – users elsewhere across the entire Solana network should not be affected. (There are currently some disagreement within the Solana community to learn whether local fresh markets are actually working as effectively as expected, in part because of hyper-congestion this can occur in crowded mini-gas ecosystems.)
But Solana’s setup stands in stark contrast to Ethereum, where demand for wildly popular NFTs has already increased. clogged the entire networkwhich causes gas costs to skyrocket for everyone.
The concept of “multi-dimensional gas fees” proposed by Vitalik Buterin effectively seeks to make Ethereum transaction costs more equitable. But it doesn’t seem to describe a boutique system like Solana’s, in which each individual project on Ethereum would become its own siled gas ecosystem.
Instead, multidimensional gas on Ethereum would only distinguish between different macro categories of effort required to complete transactions on the network, said Marius Van Der Wijden, lead developer of Ethereum. Decrypt. For example, compute, storage, and call data may generate different premiums at any given time, depending on demand. Different on-chain transactions consist of different ratios of these computational categories.
By Buterin, Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade Goes Live in March, was the beginning of such a system by sending layer 2 data, that coming from layer 2 networks like Arbitrum, to “blobs”. Blobs have different prices and limits than the rest of an Ethereum block.
On a macro level, expanding multi-dimensional gas to differentiate more computing categories could improve Ethereum’s efficiency and, according to Buterin, significantly increase the network’s mainnet scalability.
But it probably wouldn’t protect Ethereum users from spikes in network volatility induced by hot projects – it’s not that specialized a design.
So, all that to say: Solana and Ethereum maximalists, fear not. There will still be many differences to distinguish.
Edited by Andrew Hayward