The co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, Vitalik Buterin, has said that the transaction fee on layer two networks needed to be below $0.05 to be “truly acceptable.” Buterin was responding to a tweet showing the transaction fees on all Ethereum layer-two networks.
Transaction fees on L2 networks should be below $0.05
Buterin’s remarks were in response to a Twitter post by the founder of the “Bankless” podcast, Ryan Sean Adams, who shared a screenshot detailing the average transaction fees for eight Ethereum layer-two networks.
From the data, the only network that meets Buterin’s expectations is Metis, whose transaction fees are $0.02. However, swap fees on the network are high and cost $0.14. Transaction fees on the other networks are quite high, with Loopring and the Aztec Network charging $0.12 and $1.98, respectively.
On the other hand, fees on the Ethereum layer one network are quite high. Transaction fees on the network currently stand at $3.26 per transaction and $16.31 per token swap. However, the fees skyrocket when there are congestions on the network. For instance, the recent launch of Otherdeed NFTs by Yuga Labs spiked the transaction fees to $14,000 for each mint.
Adams’ tweet opined that having layer 2s on Ethereum made the network less expensive. However, Buterin disagreed, saying, “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.”
Buterin advocates for affordable transaction fees
Despite the high gas fees on the Ethereum network, Buterin has remained optimistic that there was a need to make blockchain transactions cheap. In 2017, Buterin said that “the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction.”
He said that making blockchain fees cheaper was the ultimate goal in 2017, and it remained so to date. The Ethereum network recently proposed proto-danksharding, also known as EIP-4844, to simplify the Ethereum network’s design and lower transaction fees.
Buterin explained this process in a blog post last month, saying, “because validators and clients still have to download full blob contents, data bandwidth in proto-danksharding is targeted to 1 MB per slot instead of the full 16 MB. However, there are nevertheless large scalability gains because this data is not competing with the gas usage of existing Ethereum transactions.”
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