ETH Developers Discuss Gas Optimization But Is It Too Late?

ETH developers discuss a plan for gas optimization but observers believe that there’s little that they can do right now. In our ethereum latest news, we are reading more about their plan.

The ETH Developers discuss a plan on a variety of Ethereum Improvement Proposal as gas fees are reaching record-high levels. The agenda included a few discussion points on high gas prices and a few ways to solve the issue. Alexey Akhunov, the independent Ethereum researcher opened the call with a comment on the current gas tokens and how they can push the prices higher. He outlined how the mempool is filled with transactions bidding a certain gas price to mint the tokens and compared the approach to other order book exchanges where the traders are looking for dips with low price orders. According to him, the fact that the gas bidding orders cannot be canceled, it could mean that the prices remain pumped artificially as any dip is bought by default.

While the proposal to eliminate the refund mechanism that underpins the tokens is still floating around, Akhunov said that the magnitude of gas token minting could account for about 2% of the gas usage. This will suggest some negative contributions but he said that he will need more to find the data before discussing options to eliminate the mechanism soon. The remaining topics were less immediate in terms of gas price discussions and one of them even included EIP by Vitalik Buterin and Martin Swende. Filed as EIP2929, the proposal will increase gas costs for certain storage operations but this is being done as a protection from Denial of Service attacks. Akhunov was skeptical about the complex changes and said that the discussion will continue on finer points.

Raising gas costs seems counterintuitive but this could help the ETH developers feel more confident about the gas limit increases. The threat of DDoS attacks was the one thing holding back the increases from being implemented. The further EIP that will have the strongest impact on the general user experience is EIP2711. The proposal could let one account pay for somebody else’s fee and will create a batched transaction which is guaranteed to be executed in the order they were submitted.

The latter could bring gas savings and these systems are already implemented in an application layer on Uniswap. The proposal was discussed but there were no decisions yet made. These changes are mainly discussed for the inclusion of the Berlin hard fork but other proposals still have to be tested and approved.