Vitalik Buterin Co-Writes EIP-4488 Proposal To Lower Layer-2 Gas Fees
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has co-authored a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal, EIP-4488, that aims to resolve gas costs issue for Layer 2 scaling solutions.
Buterin and Ethereum developer Ansgar Dietrichs co-authored a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal called EIP-4488 that aims to find solution to cut the gas fees of Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions. The proposal is intended to act as a more immediate fix to high gas costs while more robust solutions are developed.
The new Ethereum Improvement Proposal designed to lower Layer 2 gas fees is aimed as short term solution while more effective long-term solutions are developed.
Ethereum gas fees have been very high for the last few months, and while Layer 2 scaling solutions that use either Optimistic Rollups or ZK-Rollups are “the only trustless scaling solution for Ethereum,” even gas fees using these protocols are too expensive for some.
As an example, Optimism and Arbitrum often provide fees 3-8x lower than users can get on the Ethereum base layer, and ZK-Rollups can provide fees up to 100x lower than on the Ethereum base layer, but these fees still are not trivial.
EIP-4488 aims to decrease Layer 2 gas fees in two ways: by decreasing transaction calldata cost, which is a primary mechanism for both Optimistic Rollups and ZK-Rollups, as well as by adding a ceiling for total transaction calldata that can be in a block. Increasing the amount of data space available to rollups is, according to Buterin, doable today, as block sizes are nowhere near sizes that would threaten network stability.
A roadmap for how data space available to rollups can be greatly expanded (and hence rollup fees greatly reduced) progressively, starting from calldata gas cost reduction and continuing with step-by-step rollout of sharding:https://t.co/TixzvKInSN
Despite data sharding could be seen as the long-term solution to the imperfections of rollups, the new proposal aims to reduce gas fees in the very short term, possibly by Christmas of this year, according to a tweet by the team at zkSync, itself a Layer 2 scaling protocol.
This plan will:
* Make rollups cheaper in the very near term, possibly before Christmas (lowering the costs ~5x). * Enable resilient yet practically limitless scalability far into the future (data availability sampling).
With Buterin himself calling for an “ecosystem-wide transition to a rollup-centric Ethereum” as the desired short-term solution to cut gas costs, it is no surprise that Ethereum scaling solutions have grown alongside Ethereum.
