Ethereum Layer-2 Fees Should Be Under $0.05 to Be ‘Truly Acceptable’: Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum, the world’s leading smart contracts platform, has been historically plagued by high transaction costs.

Developers have been trying to address this issue through the so-called layer-2 solutions that help scale applications by processing transactions off of the Ethereum mainnet while maintaining the same level of security and decentralization.

While transaction fees on many layer-2 networks are indeed lower when compared to the Ethereum mainnet, Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the network, reckons they need to be under five cents to be “truly acceptable.”

ETH

-12.93%$2,300.45

---

24H7D1M1YMAX

Price data by

ETH price

“Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable [in my opinion]. But we’re definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!” he tweeted on Tuesday.

The proto-danksharding that Buterin referred to in his tweet is a recently proposed improvement for Ethereum (EIP-4844) designed to help the network scale in the short term. The upgrade enables a new type of transaction called a “blob-carrying transaction” that carries extra data that can’t be accessed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Buterin’s tweet came as a response to a post from Ryan Sean Adams, the Bankless podcast host, who shared a screenshot of the average gas fees for eight popular layer-2 networks, calculated by L2 Fees.

The highest was Arbitrum One at $0.66 to send Ethereum and $0.92 for a token swap, while the lowest was the Metis Network at $0.02 to send Ethereum and $0.15 for a token swap.

For comparison, an average transaction on the Ethereum mainnet currently costs 0.005 ETH ($14.1), according to data from Bitinfocharts.

This figure was much higher following the May 1 Yuga Labs’ latest NFT collection launch, resulting in average gas fees spiking to nearly $200.

 NFT Revolution

Bored Ape Creators Slammed for 'Nightmare' Ethereum NFT Land Drop, 'Tone Deaf' Response

Saturday’s launch of NFT virtual land deeds for Yuga Labs’ Otherside—an upcoming metaverse game based on the Bored Ape Yacht Club—was the largest NFT drop to date, and it has thus far yielded over $900 million to date in total sales volume. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Yuga Labs offered up 55,000 Ethereum NFT “Otherdeeds” that represent digital terrain in the game, and the frenzied attempt by approved buyers to snap up the valuable NFTs drove up the Ethereum network’s gas fees to startling...

Buterin on Ethereum gas fees

This is not the first time the Ethereum co-founder has highlighted the issue of high gas fees on the network.

Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum's 'Nearly Unusable' for Many App Types

Co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote today that Ethereum is "nearly unusable" for many types of applications. And, judging by the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, this could be the case for many years to come. "The L1 is nearly unusable for many classes of applications, and there’s no non-L2 path that can get us to scalability in the short-to-medium term," Buterin wrote in an Ethereum developer thread earlier today. L1 refers to layer one, or the base protocol, which in this case is the Ethereum blockchain. L...

In July 2020, Buterin called for Ethereum’s fee market reform, arguing that high gas costs could make the network less secure.

Earlier this year, he also said that he still supports previous comments that "the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction."

“That was the goal in 2017, and it's still the goal now. It's precisely why we're spending so much time working on scalability,” said Buterin at the time.