Vitalik Buterin says transaction fees need to reduce to 5 cents to remain acceptable

Vitalik Buterin believes that L2 scaling solutions need to become more efficient, and their transaction fees need to be as low as $0.05 to become truly acceptable

By Shashank Bhardwaj

Image: Michael Ciaglo / Getty Images via AFP

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted that layer-2 scaling solutions, despite their progress, need to bring down their transaction fees to as low as $0.05 in order to be truly accepted by the developer community and crypto masses.

Vitalik Buterin made this comment in response to a tweet by Ryan Sean Adams, the host of the Bankless podcast, who tweeted a screenshot displaying transaction fees of eight layer-2 scaling solutions. The screenshot had data insights from the website L2fees.info which compares Ethereum’s Layer-1 network to the Layer-2 network built on top of Ethereum.

Adams stressed that layer-2 scaling solutions play a significant role in keeping Ethereum affordable and noted that Ethereum is not expensive. But Vitalik stated otherwise and said that the network is still getting there. The average transaction fees on Ethereum currently stand at 1.7 ETH at the time of writing. He tweeted, “Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable, imo. But we're definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!”

The proto-danksharding or EIP-4844, referred to by Buterin in his tweet, is a recently proposed upgrade to provide a new and simplified design instead of the previous sharding designs for Ethereum. The upgrade will be implemented onto the network without any sharding upgrades activated on the Ethereum network.

The major goal of this upgrade will be to help the network attain large scalability in the short term, thereby reducing network congestion and gas fees. Buterin had talked in detail about the technical aspects and goals of the EIP-4844 upgrade in a blog post last month. The sharding upgrade is scheduled to happen sometime in 2023 after the Merge when the Mainnet integrates with the Beacon Chain.

This $0.05 gas fee goal of Buterin’s has been a long-held one. He had said in a 2017 interview, “the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction.” Buterin reiterated his stand in a long Twitter thread in January about the major things he has said over a period of 10 years. He had tweeted, “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.”

Currently, only one L2 scaling protocol holds to Buterin’s gas fee vision—Metis Network which has a gas fee of $0.02. The other contenders in the low gas fees race are not even close, with Loopring charging $0.12 per transaction followed by Aztec at $1.98 per transaction.

Shashank is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash

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