Vitalik discusses the impact of multi-dimensional gas pricing to enhance Ethereum’s fee standards
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has published a new article titled “Multidimensional gas pricing” explaining the pricing of gas in multiple dimensions. The traditional approach of Ethereum has been to use a single resource called “gas” to price transactions based on computational work. This approach covers computation, storage, data bandwidth, and ZK-SNARK proof generation.
Recent examples of transactions have shown various costs, such as base costs, invoked data bytes, storage operations, etc. The cost is directly proportional to the total gas used.
While the single gas system simplifies market operations and cost optimization, it treats different resources as equal, which may allow for unsafe network operations due to incorrect gas limits.
Multidimensional gas pricing, as seen in EIP-4844, differentiates resource costs and addresses efficiency issues through optimized and actual resource limits.
The introduction of “blobs” as Rollup-friendly data in blocks allows for separate pricing and limiting of data and computational resources, significantly reducing the cost of Rollup transactions and slightly increasing block size.
Stateless clients, which face the challenge of managing storage proofs with minimal local data, are expected to transition to multidimensional gas pricing to more accurately price storage operations.
Proposals like EIP-7623 attempt to improve transactions based on the cost of data or computation, with the goal of increasing throughput and security.
The ultimate goal of multidimensional gas pricing is to individually adjust various resource requirements within Ethereum, improving scalability and efficiency, although this complexity may make transaction optimization and EVM design more complicated.
Considering the need to maintain compatibility with existing applications, specific technical solutions such as proportional sub-call gas limits highlight the trade-offs and potential increase in system complexity required for implementing multidimensional gas strategies.
Vitalik Buterin
Ethereum
Multidimensional Gas
