Vitalik Buterin: ETH L2 Fees Must Be Under $0.05 to be ‘Truly Acceptable’

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes gas fees on Ethereum layer-2s should be less than 10 cents in order to be “truly acceptable”.

The comment came as a response to a Twitter post from “Bankless” podcast host Ryan Sean Adams, who shared a screenshot of eight layer-2 protocols and their average transaction gas fees:

Layer-2s are protocols built on top of an existing blockchain. Since L2s are connected to a main chain – in this case, Ethereum – they inherit its security properties. So far, most layer-2s are designed to aid the Ethereum network with certain setbacks, such as scalability and throughput.

A layer-2 solution takes transactions out of the Ethereum network to process them in a secondary chain, in what is known as off-chain activity. This secondary chain provides high throughput and cheaper transaction fees while the mainchain provides security.

Currently, the cheapest ETH L2 solution is Metis Network, which has gas fees of US$0.02. However, swapping tokens costs $0.15, and bigger fees may be applied depending on the order.

‘Danksharding’ the Ethereum Network

With his mention of danksharding (aka EIP-4844), Buterin was referring to a new sharding model proposed for Ethereum that seeks to simplify previous sharding designs. This proposal will theoretically scale the Ethereum network by adding a new type of transaction dubbed the “blob-carrying transaction”, which carries an additional 125KB worth of data.

Most members of crypto Twitter agreed with the idea that the biggest stepping stone for Ethereum is transaction costs. While danksharding can help scale the network, ETH 2.0 has been delayed again – this time, the sharding might occur somewhere between the end of 2022 or early 2023.

Recently, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) hit a milestone by surpassing one million domain names created, causing the ENS token to surge 86 percent in value shortly after the announcement.