Hassan Maishera
Buterin Proposes Calldata Limit Per Block
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has proposed a new limit on the total transaction calldata in a block to decrease the overall transaction gas cost over the ETH network. He made this proposal in a post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, EIP-4488.
The popular Ethereum figure talked about the high gas fees on the network and proposed a way to solve it. He stated that it takes time to deploy sharding, which is why a short-term option is needed. Buterin said, “Hence, a short-term solution to further cut costs for rollups and to incentivize an ecosystem-wide transition to a rollup-centric Ethereum is desired.”
His proposal could reduce the gas fees without further adding a limit to the block size, but he pointed out that there could be security concerns when the calldata gas is reduced from 16 to 3. Buterin added that “[This] would increase the maximum block size to 10M bytes and push the Ethereum p2p networking layer to unprecedented levels of strain and risk breaking the network.”
The Ethereum network has always battled with high gas fees. The gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain are higher than virtually all other cryptocurrency blockchains. Due to the high transaction fees, cryptocurrency developers and users sometimes move to other networks such as Binance Smart Chain, Solana, Cardano, Avalanche and a host of others.
The Ethereum development team has been working hard for the past few months to correct these issues. Ethereum is migrating to the proof of stake protocol, which is expected to be faster than its current proof of work protocol. Furthermore, the PoS protocol is expected to reduce the gas fees of the Ethereum blockchain.
