ETH Gas Fee Is Too Expensive, Ethereum Vitalik Buterin Boss Immediately Solves The Problem

JAKARTA – The Ethereum network is known for its high transaction fees or gas fees. Some time ago, a whale who called himself Mr. Whale, admitted to buying a cup for 4 US dollars using ETH, and the gas fee was more expensive than the price of the cup he bought. The founder of Dogecoin, Billy Markus admits that he likes Ethereum but he regrets that the gas fee is too high.

Bought a $4 cup of coffee using Ethereum! It only cost me $2589 in gas fees and took 18 hours to send.The Future of Finance! ️

— Mr. Whale (@CryptoWhale) November 2, 2021

Due to the gas fee issue, Ethereum boss Vitalik Buterin is working hard to overcome the high transaction fees on the ETH network. Buterin submitted a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) aimed at addressing the issue.

Ethereum is only capable of processing 15 transactions per second, gas fees tend to spike when the network is congested. On November 9, the average transaction network fee was USD 62 per transaction. As of now, Ethereum transaction fees are around USD 44, according to BitInfoCharts.

After highlighting concerns regarding transaction fees on the Ethereum network, Buterin suggested the new EIP-4488, saying that it would “reduce the gas cost of calldata transactions, and add a limit to how many total calldata transactions can be in one block.”

In other words, the EIP-4488 will limit the total calldata transactions, where data from external calls to functions is stored, before reducing the gas fee or gas cost calldata to eliminate the possibility of network outages.

“Only reducing the gas cost calldata from 16 to 3 will increase the maximum block size to 10 million bytes. This will push Ethereum's p2p [peer-to-peer] network layer to unprecedented levels of tension and risk of network outages; some previous live broadcasts testing ~500 kB blocks a few years ago removed some bootstrap nodes,” said Buterin.

He added that the “cost-and-limits reduction proposal” would increase the maximum block size to 1.5 MB, which “would be sufficient while preventing most security risks.”

This new solution is expected to reduce data transaction costs. According to BitMEX Research, an industry analytics company, the update can reduce gas costs by up to five times. If the proposal is approved, its implementation will require a scheduled network upgrade.

However, these efforts do not have a number of consequences due to the implications of the reform. First, Alex Krusz, an Ethereum developer, said that there could be some far-reaching consequences as a result of the update.

“While it may seem simplistic, it can be argued that calldata boundaries are an architectural decision with bigger implications than simply modifying the gas constants,” said Krusz.

“If there is an arbitrary limit in place, why not make it a soft limit, or impose it on the entire block size rather than on the call data specifically?”

Tim Beiko, an Ethereum Core developer, said that one of the challenges of the calldata solution is “affecting the block size on Ethereum.”

“It's literally the data we add to every transaction. If we lower gas costs, and maintain the same gas cap, we then have a bigger block, which can be a problem in the short and long term,” Beiko said.

Specifically, EIP-4488 is a "short-term" remedy for Ethereum's sky-high gas costs. Arguably, the main update that is expected to solve Ethereum's scalability issues is the shift from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanisms.

According to data reports from Coingecko, Ehtereum is currently trading at a price of 4,379 US dollars or equivalent to Rp. 62,824,079. The second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin experienced a 7 percent increase in the past week.