Vitalik Buterin proposes ways to cut Ethereum’s transaction costs

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, during a developers’ video conference, put forward two proposals to reduce transaction costs when using ZK-Rollups.

After @lightclients, @VitalikButerin had two proposals he shared about how we could reduce transaction costs on rollups. Both introduce a new transaction type which contains a blob of data, a bit like a ‘mini chunk of shard data’.

— Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth 🔥🧱 (@TimBeiko) February 4, 2022

The solutions involve using large blobs of binary data, Beiko explained. It is something like a «mini shard data fragment».

According to him, the first option requires minimal changes to support Ethereum clients «execution layer». The second approach entails more ‘sanitation-technical’ work, but brings the network closer to ‘something compatible with full sharding’, Beiko noted.

«Some have proposed adding ‘blob-carrying transactions’ to the upcoming hard fork, delivering higher scalability of Rollups packages until the completion of full sharding», — прокомментировал Бутерин твит разработчика о первом предложении.

In his description of the solutions he confirmed that in the near- and mid-term, ZK-Rollups appear the only trustless «a scaling solution for Ethereum». The technology can cut fees by roughly 3-8 times compared with the base layer. Better data compression in data packets could reduce fees by another 40-100 times, Buterin said. And he even said such a level would be too high for users.

«This EIP serves as a stopgap until a certain point, implementing a transaction format that will be used when sharding, effectively not segmenting them», — подчеркнул Бутерин.

Beiko said that developers could not assess the effort required to implement the proposed solutions or the viability of diverting resources to non-core and clearly temporary work. However, several researchers have begun prototyping ‘blob-transactions’ to gauge the complexity.

Earlier, the winner of Buterin’s Twitter poll on the best Ethereum alternative was Cardano, ahead of Bitcoin.