Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, and developer Tim Beiko have been discussing a proposed solution to the data transfer gas problem and current scaling issues. Buterin talked about adding a feature like “blob-carrying transactions” in a “near-future hard fork.”
‘Transactions carrying blobs’
Ethereum (ETH) price has moved north over the past two weeks, climbing more than 25% in that time. Last week, ETH gained over 16% and the crypto asset managed to break above $3,000 per ETH zone. On February 4, 2022, the co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin shared a tweet written by ETH developer Tim Beiko which offers a new Ethereum transaction format.
“Some proposals to add ‘blob-carrying transactions’ in a near-future hard fork, bringing higher scalability to rollups before full sharding is complete,” Buterin wrote. Ethereum’s co-founder further shared an explainer that was published to Reddit which details how the network can scale. Buterin’s proposal notes further detail:
‘[Blob-carrying transactions]’ contain a large amount of data that cannot be accessed by the EVM runtime, but the commit can be accessed. The format is intended to be fully compatible with the future Danksharding specification.
It’s possible that the new ‘blob-carrying transactions’ proposal could be implemented in the Shanghai hard fork. According to Buterin, the new transaction format would be connected to the beacon block and consensus nodes.
“This EIP provides an interim solution up to this point by implementing the transaction format that would be used in sharding, but not actually sharding those transactions,” Buterin’s notes say. The Ethereum co-founder added:
Instead, they would simply be part of the beacon block and would need to be downloaded by all consensus nodes (but can be deleted after only a relatively short delay). There would be a reduced cap on the number of these transactions that can be included, corresponding to a target of ~1 MB per block and a limit of ~2 MB.
Ethereum data transfer fees remain high, L2 fees significantly lower
Meanwhile, the average transaction fee on February 6, 2022 is 0.011 ether or $31.99 per transfer. The median size Ethereum transaction fees are between $4.59 and $7.87, or 0.0026 ether per transaction. Of course, moving an ERC20 token or exchanging a token can cost users more gas to push the transaction. Layer two (L2) transactions are cheaper than on-chain layer one (L1) transfers, with Loopring being the cheapest.
Loopring currently costs $0.11 per transfer while Zksync can cost around $0.17 per transaction. Transfers using L2 solutions like Loopring, Zksync, Polygon Hermez, Optimism, Boba Network, and Arbitrum One are significantly cheaper than L1 transfers. The latest proposal concerning ‘blob-carrying transactions’ could alleviate the chain’s congestion and high fees.
