Cryptocurrency News

Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin Unveils New Plan to Curb Surging Gas Fees

John Jeffries

The co-founder of the Ethereum network, Vitalik Buterin, has recently presented the community with a new idea to fix the transaction fees issue on the network. During the last few months, the amount of crypto tokens based on the Ethereum network has increased. The latest Metaverse tokens SAND and MANA are also based on the same ecosystem.

The result of the massive traffic has created the issue of inflating the transaction fees for the users. Buterin has posted on an Ethereum Magician forum about a new short-term fix to address the issue. Due to the increasing gas fee, many cryptocurrency investors have decided to migrate to other networks, and while some have also shifted their development projects from the ecosystem.

EIP-4488 Protocol and Ethereum Network

The EIP-4488 protocol plans to reduce the number of calldata stored on a single ETH block from 16 to 3. Calldata is the function storage with external visibility. The EIP-4488 implementation will reduce the transaction load from the peer-to-peer networking layer on the Ethereum blockchain and increase the single block size to 10 megabytes.

The same protocol will also increase the security for the users by limiting the flow of information on each transaction. Buterin claims that developers have tested running a 500 KB block simulation that resulted in relaxing the bootstrapping nodes a few years ago. Another important feature of the EIP-4488 is that it allows the miners to freeze a transaction temporarily during upload on the block until the calldata limit is fulfilled.

Several Ethereum developers have taken up an issue with the new EIP-4488 proposal. The developers claim that the new upgrade poses a threat of increasing the chances of dropping the rolled-up transactions. Under these circumstances, the users will have to pay double transaction fees to make up for the lack of successful transaction execution.

Furthermore, the developers have protested that adding more constraint by the EIP-4488 update will generate a need for higher bids to surpass the competing rollup transactions on the same calldata block. Ethereum network users had to pay a higher gas fee per transaction, which is often more than the amount of cryptocurrency that they wish to move around.