Vitalik proposes a new ‘multidimensional’ Ethereum fee structure

Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, has started brainstorming once more in a bid to better the community's current payment structure.

The idea, dubbed “Multidimensional EIP-1559,” was announced in a blog on Jan. 5 by Buterin, who stated that different assets within the Ethereum Digital Machine (EVM) possess varied fuel use requirements.

He went on to say that across the EVM, there are distinct restrictions for short-lived "burst" capability versus “sustained” capability, mentioning block knowledge storage, witness knowledge storage, as well as block state measurement modifications as examples like blockchaineventon.

The issue, according to Buterin, is that the existing approach does not effectively handle variances in resource restrictions for the Ethereum Virtual Machine's numerous resources. As an example, Buterin highlighted how transaction data + call-data transactions take only 3% of the gas in a block. Buterin went on to say that certain blocks could have 67 times the data of an ordinary block.

According to him, the current method, which involves all assets being merged into one big multi-dimensional framework does little to nothing in dealing with these variances.

When these boundaries are misaligned, the issue is that moving all of the diverse assets into just one results in “quite sub-optimal fuel costs,” he warned.

Buterin described his complex proposed changes using a variety of technical arithmetic, but summarily, the plan presented two viable possibilities based on pricing dubbed “multidimensional”.

The most straightforward method would be to divide the bottom payment for each unit of useful resource by the overall base payment to arrive at the fuel value for assets like name knowledge and storage. The bottom payment is a community payment that is fixed for each block and is part of the EIP-1559 algorithm system.

The second, more sophisticated option establishes a base payment for using assets while also imposing burst limitations on each resource. Also, there would be "precedence charges," which would be computed by multiplying the proportion by the bottom payment.

The disadvantage of the multidimensional payment structure, according to him, is that “block builders would not be able to simply settle for transactions in the high-to-low order of fee-per-gas.” They must maintain the size and resolve any remaining mathematical concerns.

It is left to watch out whether the idea will be approved, as the next major increase takes precedence for the time being. The Ethereum community is currently preparing for "the merger," which will allow the ETH blockchain to connect to the Beacon Chain and complete Proof-of-Work. Speaking of the Kintsugi test net, work is going on as regards testing, and we expect complete deployment before April this year.

Earlier in August, as part of the London update procedure, EIP-1559 was used to raze a part of the gas fees in a bid to make fuel pricing better predictable.

As a result of the burn tracker, 1.36 million ETH, which is worth nearly $4.7 billion currently, has been destroyed.

The Multidimensional EIP-1559

One of Ethereum's most significant improvements in recent years is EIP-1559. It was deployed in August as part of the London hard fork, and it put a base price on Ethereum transactions to make gas fees on the network more predictable (it previously used a bidding system). Crucially, the base fee is also burned, making the supply of ETH even more limited. Due to EIP-1559, ETH could become a deflationary asset after the merge to Proof-of-Stake.

Buterin outlined two approaches to implementing multidimensional EIP-1559. The gas price for resources like call-data and storage utilization would be computed by dividing the base cost for one unit of the resource by the base fee in the first option. The other, harder method is to specify a price for using resources as a base cost, such as 1 Wei. Unlike the first option, a block gas limit would not be available in this case, but in the stead of that, burst limits on every resource. Priority fees would be unique in that they would be calculated as a percentage, with block producers receiving priority fee payments equal to the basic fees multiplied by the percentage.

As earlier stated, we expect a full deployment during the first half of this year, after which follows sharing. To this end, we might have to wait for a little before we see the implementation of any further EIP-1559 adjustments.

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