Ethereum moves towards a multi-dimensional gas fee era: Can Buterin's proposal make ETH rival Solana's efficient network?

The co-founder of Ethereum has proposed major changes to the network’s gas fee structure. Would that make it more like its main rivals?

Vitalik Buterin, the network architect of Ethereum, proposed in a recent article that Ethereum needs a better mechanism to charge transaction fees to users. He believes there is room for improvement in the current fee system, suggesting that Ethereum’s development team is looking to optimize its network’s economic model to increase efficiency and user satisfaction.

Buterin’s views have received widespread attention from the community because, as one of the co-founders of Ethereum, he has an important influence on the future development of the network. His article may inspire further discussion and potential improvements regarding transaction fee structures and network upgrades.

Similar fee model structure

Buterin's post proposed paving the way for a more customized and fair transaction fee system, which received an immediate positive response from two main groups: On the one hand, Ethereum users were dissatisfied with the network's high mainnet fee reduction Solana users and developers, on the other hand, noted that Buterin's proposal sounded very much like the fee model already adopted by the Solana network itself.

Mert Mumtaz, CEO and co-founder of Helius Labs and a well-known Solana developer, said in an interview with reporters, "This is definitely a solution similar to Solana." This evaluation reflects the Solana community’s approval of Buterin’s proposal and also points out the similarities in the design of the two networks’ fee structures. Mumtaz’s comments may indicate that some of the core concepts of the Solana network are being considered and adopted by other major players in the industry, which has positive implications for promoting technological progress and innovation in the entire blockchain field.

So, what are the similarities between Buterin’s “multidimensional gas fee” proposal and Solana’s “local fee market”?

Gas fees refer to the transaction fees that blockchain users pay to the network. This system gives tokens like Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) their value in many ways. If you want to do almost anything on the Ethereum network, you need ETH to pay for gas, just like you need SOL to do things on Solana. When there's a lot of activity on the network, gas charges go up. When activity decreases, gas charges drop.

In some ways, Solana’s current gas fee structure and Vitalik’s “multidimensional gas fee” proposal stem from the same philosophy: to be fair, different types of on-chain transactions should cost different amounts based on demand. But in practice, the leaders of the two networks appear to have different ideas about how to implement such a concept, which can lead to significant differences in user experience.

Solana currently operates on a "local fee market" structure, where gas fees are calculated on a per-account, project-by-project basis. In this system, gas fee increases due to network congestion will mainly affect users who interact with the project, but will not significantly affect users in other parts of the network.

For example, on the Solana platform, if an NFT project is particularly popular and causes gas fees to rise, this fee increase should theoretically be limited to those users who interact directly with the project. Other network users should not be affected by this because Solana's design allows for a "local fee market" that can dynamically adjust gas fees based on the needs of a specific account or project.

However, some in the Solana community disagree on whether the local fee market will work as efficiently as intended. Part of this disagreement stems from the fact that even well-designed systems can encounter challenges under high demand, such as congestion that can occur in so-called crowded “mini-gas” ecosystems. Despite such concerns, Solana's local fee market is designed to improve the overall efficiency of the network and the user experience.

Solana’s “native fee market” structure does give it some advantages over Ethereum. On Ethereum, when an NFT project or any other application becomes very popular, the entire network can be affected, as the increase in transaction demand causes a general increase in gas fees for all users. This situation has happened many times on Ethereum in the past, especially when the NFT market was active or DeFi (decentralized finance) applications underwent large-scale token migration.

What are the differences?

The "multidimensional gas fee" concept proposed by Vitalik Buterin aims to make Ethereum's transaction costs more fair and reasonable. This concept optimizes the fee structure by taking into account different dimensions of the transaction, such as transaction complexity and actual demand for network resources. However, this proposal does not directly herald the formation of a system similar to the Solana network's "local fee market", in which each individual project or application can have its own independent gas fee environment. This means that network congestion and fee increases generated by each project only affect users who interact directly with that project and not the rest of the network.

In contrast, unlike Solana’s independent fee market, the multi-dimensional gas fee model adopted by Ethereum primarily categorizes transaction costs at the network level. According to Ethereum core developer Marius Van Der Wijden, the purpose of the multi-dimensional Gas fee model is to identify and distinguish the various types of work required to perform network transactions, such as calculation, storage and data calls, and treat them as different macro job categories. This means that at any given point in time, these different work categories may be assigned different value or fee weights depending on the network’s needs and transaction types. In other words, different types of on-chain transactions will be charged different fees because they contain different combinations and proportions of these computational categories. This multi-dimensional pricing strategy is designed to more accurately reflect the actual workload required to complete various transactions, thereby improving the fairness and efficiency of the fee structure.

According to Buterin, Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, which went live in March, sends “Blobs” via Layer 2 data from Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum. Compared to other transactions in the Ethereum block, Blobs are There are separate standards and requirements for fees and processing rules. This design allows Blobs to be stored and processed with different costs and constraints, thus providing a more flexible and efficient processing method for specific types of data or transactions.

Summarize

At a macro level, extending the multi-dimensional Gas fee model to more computing categories may improve Ethereum’s transaction processing efficiency. As Vitalik Buterin believes, this will greatly enhance the scalability of the Ethereum mainnet.

However, even so, Ethereum users may still not be completely immune to network congestion and fee fluctuations caused by popular projects, because the model is not designed to be as "boutique" as Solana, which allows each project to form its own independent Gas cost environment.

A multi-dimensional gas fee model may improve Ethereum’s efficiency and scalability, but it will not completely isolate network fluctuations caused by popular projects. Therefore, there are still significant differences in the treatment of network fees between Solana and Ethereum.

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