A new proposal to improve fee structure
Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum) has once again published a new proposal that attempts to remedy the current Ethereum network fee structure.
The proposal titled “Multidimensional EIP-1559” was released on January 5th, and isn’t unlike the recent EIP-4488, as they both seek to improve the issue of unnecessarily high fees. However, while the previous proposal sought to outright reduce fees, this new one will instead change the way gas fees are calculated which should ideally optimise gas costs.
Buterin points out that right now, the usage of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, block data, witness data, and more are currently funnelled into a single source/role, which leads to suboptimal gas costs. “The scheme we have today, where all the resources are combined together into one multidimensional (‘gas’) resource, does a poor job of dealing with these differences.”
What’s EIP-1559 all about?
The issue with the current system is that it fails to account for the distinctions of all the different resources that are integrated into the single current resource, gas. This is highly inefficient, as he goes on to outline. One example of this would be transaction and call data, which consumes only 3% of the gas in a block on average – while some blocks can contain 67X more data than an average block.
To remedy this, Buterin has proposed two solutions:
Source: Ethresearch
The first option, which Buterin describes as “less pure”, maintains the limits that blocks currently have, while the gas costs of resources are significantly reduced (through dividing the base fee of resources by total base fee).
Buterin admits the second is more complex, however it is “more pure”. It removes the gas limits for blocks, but includes burst limits and “Priority fees” which are set as a percentage, and calculated by multiplying the percentage by the base fee.
To boil it down simply, these multidimensional solutions would calculate gas fees more fairly based on distinct elements of resource usage, helping separate those of critical urgency from those that are less time critical. Unfortunately, the downside as Buterin states, is that block builders would need to solve additional mathematical problems – rather than simply prioritising using a high-to-low order of fee-per-gas as they do now.
Overall sentiment
These changes will greatly benefit the Ethereum user experience, but the proposal wasn’t without some mixed responses.
Oisin Kyne (CTO of Obel Network) says: “I think this would be a reasonable suggestion although I imagine it would be a significant engineering undertaking.” Another user by the moniker ‘Domothy’ posed the question: “How do per-transaction limits play into this?” further pondering possible implications regarding UX, and transactional gas limits, to which Buterin responded: “The complexity in multidimensionality going too high is definitely a good reason to stick to ~4 dimensions and not try to go beyond that.”
Overall, the sentiment behind the multidimensional EIP-1559 was a positive one, some Redditors remarking: “ETHactly what we need”. However, users may have to hold back their enthusiasm for a little while longer. This is because the network is preparing for the shift to Ethereum 2.0, which will effectively end its Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm and be the network’s most significant update yet. So until the 2.0 update is fully deployed, this multidimensional upgrade to the preexisting EIP-1559 will have to wait.
