Will Vitalik Buterin’s gas fee proposal make Ethereum more similar to Solana?

Ethereum has much better uses The network’s chief architect, Vitalik Buterin, argued in a widely circulated essay on Thursday that the system would charge users transaction fees.

Buterin’s post A more tailored and equitable system received immediate response from two key groups. Ethereum Users expressed excitement at the prospect of lower fees on the network’s expensive mainnet; And there were Solana users and developers who noticed that Buterin’s proposal was very similar to the fee model of the Solana network itself.

“This is definitely a Solana-like approach,” said Mert Mumtaz. Renowned Solana builder and co-founder and CEO of an infrastructure startup Helius Labssaid decryption.

So how similar are they? Buterin’s “multidimensional gas fee” proposal over Solana’s “regional fee market”?

gas Fees refer to the transaction costs that blockchain users pay to the network. This system in many ways gives value to tokens like Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL). Just as you need SOL to perform operations on Solana, you will need ETH to pay for gas to perform almost any operation on the Ethereum network. If there is a lot of activity on the network, your gas rates will go up. And less activity means lower gas bills.

In some ways, Solana’s current gas fee structure is And Vitalik’s The “multidimensional gas fee” proposal stems from the same thing. Philosophy: In the name of fairness, different types of on-chain transactions should have different costs depending on demand. But in practice, the leaders of the two networks appear to have different ideas about how to implement this philosophy, which could lead to potentially significant differences in user experience.

Solana currently operates in: “Local fee market” Gas fees are calculated on a per-project, per-account basis. This system effectively isolates gas bill spikes due to network congestion to specific projects.

For example, a spike in gas fees due to a hot Solana NFT mint should only affect users interacting with that project and not other users on the entire Solana network. (There are some now. disagreement There is discussion within the Solana community about whether the local fee market is actually working as effectively as intended. overcrowding This can happen in a crowded mini-gas ecosystem.)

However, Solana’s setup stands in sharp contrast to Ethereum, which previously had demand for very popular NFTs. Blocked the entire networkGas bills will skyrocket for everyone.

The “multidimensional gas fee” concept proposed by Vitalik Buterin seeks to make Ethereum transaction costs more fair. However, it does not appear that every individual project on Ethereum has outlined a boutique system like Solana, where each project becomes its own isolated gas ecosystem.

Instead, Ethereum’s multidimensional gas will only distinguish between different categories of macro effort required to complete a transaction on the network, said Ethereum core developer Marius Van Der Wijden. decryption. For example, data that is calculated, stored, and recalled can fetch different premiums at any given moment depending on demand. Different on-chain transactions consist of different proportions of that computing category.

Per Buterin Launches Ethereum’s Dencun Upgrade March, which constituted the debut of such a system by transmitting layer 2 data in “blobs” of the kind provided by layer 2 networks like Arbitrum. Blobs have different prices and limits than the rest of the Ethereum block.

At a macro level, expanding multidimensional gas to distinguish more categories of computation could improve Ethereum’s efficiency and, in Buterin’s view, significantly improve the scalability of the network’s mainnet.

However, this will not protect Ethereum users from spikes in network volatility caused by popular projects. Not very boutique in design.

In other words, Solana and Ethereum maximalists, have no fear. There will still be many differences to distinguish.

Editor: Andrew Hayward