Will Vitalik Buterin’s Gas Tax Proposal Make Ethereum More Like Solana?

Ethereum could use much better system to charge transaction fees to its users, the network’s chief architect Vitalik Buterin argued in a widely circulated essay published Thursday.

Buterin’s post, which traced a path towards a more personalized and fair system, immediately collected two types of reactions: Ethereum users, who expressed their excitement at the prospect of lower tariffs on the network’s expensive mainline; and Solana users and developers, who noted that Buterin’s proposal closely resembled the Solana network’s pricing model.

“It’s certainly a Solana approach,” Mert Mumtaz, a major builder from Solana and co-founder and CEO of the infrastructure startup Helius Laboratoriessaid Decipher.

So how similar is it Buterin’s “multidimensional gas taxes” proposal to Solana’s “local tariff markets”?

Gas Fees refer to the transaction costs that blockchain users pay to the network. This system is in many ways what gives value to tokens like Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL). You need ETH to pay for gas if you want to do anything on the Ethereum network, just like you need SOL to do things on Solana. When there is a lot of activity on the grid, gas rates increase. And when there is less activity, gas rates go down.

In a sense, Solana’s current gas tariff structure and Vitalik This is where the proposal for “multidimensional gas taxes” comes from. Philosophy: In the name of fairness, different types of on-chain transactions should cost different amounts, depending on demand. But in practice, the leaders of both networks appear to have different ideas about how to implement that philosophy, which leads to a potentially significant difference in user experience.

Solana currently operates on a “local rate markets” structure, where gas tariffs are calculated on an account-by-account, project-by-project basis. In this system, spikes in gas rates due to network congestion are effectively confined to specific projects.

For example, a spike in gas fees induced by a mint new Solana NFT should only impact users who interact with that project, while users elsewhere in the entire Solana network should not be affected. (Currently there is some disagreement within the Solana community on whether local fare markets actually function as effectively as intended, in part due to the hypercongestion which can occur in crowded mini-gas ecosystems.)

But Solana’s setup stands in stark contrast to Ethereum, where demand for highly popular NFTs had previously surged clogged the entire networkcausing gas rates to skyrocket for everyone.

The concept of “multidimensional gas taxes” proposed by Vitalik Buterin seeks to make Ethereum transaction costs fairer. But he doesn’t seem to outline a boutique system like Solana’s, in which each individual project on Ethereum would become its own isolated gas ecosystem.

Instead, multidimensional gas on Ethereum would only distinguish between different macro categories of effort needed to complete network transactions, Ethereum lead developer Marius Van Der Wijden said Decipher. For example, compute, storage, and call data might get different rewards at any given time, depending on demand. Different on-chain transactions consist of different ratios of such computation categories.

For Buterin, Ethereum’s Dencun update, which has been published in March, marked the debut of such a system by sending Layer 2 data, the kind that comes from Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum, to “blobs.” Blobs have different prices and limits than the rest of an Ethereum block.

On a macro level, expanding the multidimensional gas to distinguish between multiple computational categories could improve Ethereum’s efficiency and, according to Buterin, significantly increase the scalability of the mainnet.

But it probably wouldn’t insulate Ethereum users from spikes in network volatility induced by trending designs: It’s not that boutique in design.

So, all that needs to be said: Solana and Ethereum maximalists, fear not. There will still be many differences to distinguish.

Edited by Andrew Hayward