Vitalik Buterin floats 5 designs to reduce Ethereum’s high block rate

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation are considering at least five ways to reduce Ethereum's maximum block size in hopes of optimizing the blockchain for a “bundle-centric roadmap.”

In the year On February 5, Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researcher Tony Wahrster said that by focusing on blocks in the medium and long term, they argue that the way space is not yet optimized, the effective block size has essentially doubled. Last 12 months.

Buterin and Wahrstätter “This could be due to the start of using Ethereum for DA and the rise of trends like Inscripts.”

The blog post discusses five different complexity solutions to increase gas limits and reduce call data usage, reducing maximum block size and variance, leaving room for more data congestion in the future.

“By increasing the block gas limit and the non-zero cost of call data bytes, a smaller and more flexible block size can be achieved, leaving room for adding more blocks in the future.”

The Ethereum gas limit refers to the maximum amount of gas that can be spent to execute transactions or smart contracts in each block. A limit is set to ensure that blocks are not too large, which affects network performance and synchronization. Calldata, which consumes gas, increases the load on the network, so solutions are being sought to increase the gas limit without compromising security.

One of the first simple solutions proposed by Buterin and Wahrstätter involved increasing the call data cost from 16 to 42 gigabytes, reducing the maximum block size from 1.78 megabytes to 0.68 megabytes. This then gives room to increase the gas limit.

However, Buterin argues that this would undermine the use of call data for information delivery and negatively impact applications such as StarkNet that require large amounts of call data for on-chain authentication.

Instead, a second solution could be to increase call data costs but reduce other opcode costs.

Calldata refers to the data provided as input to smart contract function calls, while opcodes – or operation codes – are instructions that specify which computations should be performed in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Increasing the barrier gas limit

By: Tony Vitalik

ELI5 Special thanks to the Starkware team for the feedback and info!

Important Takeaways: ## The ELI5 article discusses a proposal to efficiently manage Ethereum block size by adjusting the gas limit and cost of…

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Another solution is to store call data in a single block, as the pair wrote in Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-4488. But this may affect the use of call data for data access and applications that are heavily dependent on it.

Therefore, creating a separate market for call data charges, such as how data blobs are handled, can be used to increase gas limits. The price for using call data is automatically adjusted according to demand. However, the disadvantage is that it increases the complexity in analysis and implementation.

The latest proposal is offering an “EVM Loyalty Bonus” to compensate for call data-heavy applications.

Blobs are large packets of data integrated into the Ethereum blockchain to facilitate data management and storage, which will be released with the EIP-4844 Dencun update.

However, the pair said that simply raising the cost of call data to 42 would be “too vague an approach”, while creating separate payment markets would “add too much complexity”.

“A balanced solution would be to reduce the cost of some operations and increase the cost of call data, or perhaps move to a model that incentivizes the use of call data in EVMs.”

Buterin has previously proposed calling data caps per block in 2021 to reduce gas costs.

Related: Ethereum puts air pressure on Vitalik plan to increase gas limit

In January, Vitalik Buterin proposed to increase Ethereum's gas limit by 33% to 40 million to improve network flow.

Increasing the gas limit allows more transactions per block, theoretically increasing the overall network consumption and capacity. However, it increases the load on the hardware and the risk of network spam and attacks.

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