Vitalik Buterin Proposes Calldata Limit per Block to Lower Ethereum Gas Costs

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), has proposed a new limit on the total transaction calldata in a block to lower the overall transaction calldata gas cost on the Ethereum network.

According to a post shared by Buterin on the Ethereum Magicians forum, the new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4488 highlights concerns in relation to high transaction fees on Layer-1 blockchains for rollups and the vast amount of time needed for the implementation and deployment of data sharding.

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Vitalik Buterin wrote:

“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.”

Although Buterin sees this as a means to decrease the gas costs parameters without further adding a limit to the block size, he foresees a security concern in lowering the calldata gas cost from 16 to 3:

“Simply decreasing the calldata gas cost from 16 to 3 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.”

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He also believes that 1.5 MB will be sufficient while preventing most of the security risk. Advising the Ethereum community regarding the proposal, he wrote:

“It’s worth rethinking the historical opposition to multi-dimensional resource limits and considering them as a pragmatic way to simultaneously achieve moderate scalability gains while retaining security.”

What Could Follow the Approval of the Proposal?

The new proposal, if implemented, will require a scheduled network upgrade, which will bring backward-incompatible gas repricing for the Ethereum ecosystem.

The implementation will also make miners comply with a new rule that prevents the addition of new transactions into a block when the total calldata size reaches the maximum.

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The proposal reads in part as follows:

“The burst data capacity of the chain does not increase as a result of this proposal (in fact, it slightly decreases). However, the _average_ data capacity will increase. This means that the storage requirements of history-storing will go up. A worst-case scenario would be a theoretical long-run maximum of ~1,262,861 bytes per 12 sec slot, or ~3.0 TB per year.”

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