Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), has proposed a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) to address the network’s gas price issues. Buterin did this by imposing a limit on total transaction calldata.
Gas prices tend to rise during times of network congestion, since Ethereum can only handle 15 transactions per second. The average transaction network cost per transaction was 62 USD, on November 9. According to BitInfoCharts, Ethereum transactions currently cost roughly USD 44.
Buterin proposed the new EIP-4488 after raising concerns over transaction fees on the Ethereum network, claiming that it will “reduce transaction calldata gas cost, and impose a restriction on how much total transaction calldata can be in a block.”
To put it another way, EIP-4488 would restrict the total transaction calldata, which stores data from external calls to functions, before lowering the calldata gas cost to eliminate the risk of the network being broken. The co-founder of Ethereum stated: “Simply decreasing the calldata gas cost from 16 to 3 would increase the maximum block size to 10M bytes. This would push the Ethereum p2p [peer-to-peer] networking layer to unprecedented levels of strain and risk breaking the network; some previous live tests of ~500 kB blocks a few years ago had already taken down a few bootstrap nodes.”
He went on to say that the “decrease-cost-and-cap approach” will raise the maximum block size to 1.5 MB, which “would be sufficient while avoiding the majority of the security risk.”
The new method is expected to lower the cost of data transactions. According to BitMEX Research, a market research group, the update could cut gas prices by five times. A planned network upgrade would be required for implementation, if the application is to be approved.
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