The second leading crypto asset ethereum has been dealing with high fees since the end of June and today the average ethereum transaction fee is between $5 and $34 per transfer. Although there have been many complaints about the high cost of ether gas this year, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum founder, has suggested an Ethereum Improvement Proposal. This proposal aims to reduce transaction costs by five-fold. Tim Beiko, an Ethereum developer, also discussed the idea and discussed possible “challenges”, both short-term and long-term.

Moving Ether, Transferring an ERC20, and Swapping Tokens on Ethereum Is Costly — Tim Beiko Shares EIP-4488 Insights

Following the London upgrade during the first week of August, it was assumed that EIP-1559 would relieve at least some of the pressure. However, the average transaction network fee continued to rise after the London upgrade reaching, $62 per transfer on November 9. Today, ether gas cost is lower as bitinfocharts.com indicates the average ether fee is 0. 0083 ETH per transfer, or $34.09. The web portal l2fees.info shows an ETH transaction as low as $5. 77 per transfer, but the cost to move an ERC20 is $13. 20, and swapping ETH-based tokens can cost $28. 27 per swap.

On November 22, Bitcoin.com News reported on the arguments taking place on crypto forums and social media platforms like Twitter, between Ethereum and Avalanche advocates. Ethereum is facing stiff competition from blockchains such as Binance Smart Chain and Avalanche. Developers are being pushed to do more about high gas prices due to the high fees. On November 26, Ethereum developer Tim Beiko shared the most recent developer discussion and talked about an idea to lower the costs of rollups.

The gas costs have further pushed Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to propose leveraging an idea called EIP-4488. “Decrease transaction calldata gas cost, and add a limit of how much total transaction calldata can be in a block,” Buterin suggested on Github on November 24. Essentially, the solution could decrease data transaction costs significantly and estimates say gas cost could be reduced by five times. EIP-4488 leverages a scheme called “calldata,” which is utilized in L2 (layer 2) solutions such as Optimistic and ZK rollups. Beiko discussed the possibility solution in his Twitter thread.

“The cost of rollup txns is a function of the data they post back to the Ethereum mainnet,” Beiko said. Rollup transactions are cost-effective if a rollup compresses transactions and charges Y gas to send them to the mainnet. To do this, rollups add calldata to their transactions, which is currently priced at 16 gas per byte. If we reduce the calldata cost, then we reduce the cost of rollup transactions,” the programmer added. Beiko further stated that one of the challenges to the calldata solution is that it “influences the block sizes on Ethereum.” Beiko continued:

It’s literally data we add to each transaction. We can have larger blocks if we reduce the gas cost and maintain the same gas limit. This can cause problems in the long-term and short-term. It increases the worst-case block size in the short term. If, for example, calldata was 1 gas/byte, with a 30m gas block, you’d get a 30MB block (average right now is

EIP-4444, EIP-4490, and the Upcoming Arrow Glacier Upgrade

Currently, ethereum (ETH) users either are not transacting with ether at all, leveraging expensive L1 (layer 1) network fees, or they are utilizing rollup layer solutions. Loopring costs $0.01 per transfer. L2 solutions are cheaper than L1 fees. 25 per transfer. Polygon Hermez costs $0. 25, Zksync is around $0. 27, Optimism costs $2. 39 today, and transferring with Arbitrum One is $2.43. Beiko noted in a thread that L1 fees were very high, but L2 fees were quite expensive.

“Fees on Ethereum are *highand also aren’t trivial on rollups today (~3-4$ for a ETH send on ORs and ~0. 25c on ZKRs), so it’s worth thinking about the tradeoff more,” Beiko said. In addition to talking about EIP-4488, the software programmer also mentioned EIP-4444 (Bound Historical Data in Execution Clients) and EIP-4490. “Clients must stop serving historical headers, bodies, and receipts older than one year on the p2p layer,” the EIP-4444 description says. The EIP-4444 abstract summary adds:

Clients may locally prune this historical data — This change will result in less bandwidth usage on the network as clients adopt more lightweight sync strategies based on the PoS weak subjectivity assumption.

The Ethereum developer also posted information on Twitter about the December 8th Arrow Glacier upgrade. This upgrade aims to delay the network’s difficulty bomb. Open-source programmers are working to fix the network’s problems, but alternative blockchain networks are moving ahead.

What do you think about the recent solutions proposed to address the Ethereum network’s high transfer costs? Please comment below to let us know your thoughts on this topic.

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