Buterin Wants New Gas Fee Upgrade Despite Beacon Chain Launch

Buterin wants new gas fee upgrade despite the latest beacon chain update going live as we reported in the recent Ethereum news.

Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin thanked everyone for getting involved with the latest beacon chain upgrade and now after years in the making, the proof-of-stake concept is finally becoming a reality. Beacon Chain or phase 0, is the first step towards the long journey of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism transition. Moments after it ended, Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin wants two have the roadmap revised with details of the journey:

 “The roadmap I made back in March updated with (very rough and approximate!) progress bars showing what has been done and some of the recent tweaks to the roadmap itself. A lot has been accomplished, but still a lot remains to be done!“

For now, ETH 1.0 and the beacon chain will run parallel with one another but considering the hard tasks that lie ahead for the developers, the final product will take years to develop and to be available. In the meantime, Ethereum 1.0 suffers from a few limitations with the most of them being the high gas fees. The improvement proposal 1559 was launched in 2018 for trying to tackle this problem but as a proposal, it’s not clear if it will make its way into ETH 1.0, because of the time and money involved in implementing it and then have the 2.0 upgrade nullify the efforts.

Buterin is still determined to integrate the EIP 1559 upgrade and said:

“Let’s work hard and get this important economic upgrade into ethereum soon.“

With the current ETH transaction fee system, the auction mechanism determines the gas price that is paid by the users and they send bids to execute transactions and miners then can choose which transactions to execute. However, this has set up a few issues with the most problematic one being the imbalance of power to the miners. The miners can then pick the highest paying transaction and this will result in an unusable and expensive network.

 

EIP 1559 brings a few other changes to the fee system so the gas fees will consist of the base fee and a small “miner bribe.” Instead of the auction mechanism, the base fee will move in line with the network activity and will bring greater fee predictability:

 “When the network exceeds the target per-block gas usage, the base fee increases slightly and when capacity is below the target, it decreases slightly.”