Multidimensional Gas Pricing in Ethereum Network
In the Ethereum network, resources are limited and priced using a single resource called “Gas”. Gas measures the computational work required to process specific transactions or blocks. Gas encompasses various types of efforts, including raw computation, Ethereum storage read/write operations, data bandwidth, block generation, ZK-SNARK proof costs, and more.
For example, a transaction may consume a total of 47,085 Gas, which includes a base fee of 21,000 Gas, 1,556 Gas for calldata bytes, 16,500 Gas for storage read/write, 2,149 Gas for making logs, and the remaining Gas for EVM execution. The transaction fee that users must pay is proportional to the Gas consumed. A block can contain a maximum of 30 million Gas, and the Gas price is continuously adjusted through the EIP-1559 target mechanism to ensure an average of 15 million Gas per block.
Multidimensional Gas pricing has the advantage of simplifying market design since all transactions are consolidated into a single virtual resource. It is easy to optimize transactions to minimize costs and optimize blocks to collect higher fees, excluding MEV (Miner Extractable Value). However, this approach also has the inefficiency problem of treating different resources as interchangeable when the actual network’s fundamental limitations may not allow for such interchangeability.
To address this, the concept of multidimensional Gas has been introduced, allowing for the pricing and limitation of different resources separately. By introducing “Blobs” in the Cancun upgrade, the cost of storing convolutional data on-chain has been significantly reduced. Each Ethereum block can now contain up to 6 Blobs, with independent pricing mechanisms similar to EIP-1559. This allows for a significant reduction in the cost of convolution and an increase in transaction volume.
In the future, the use of multidimensional Gas can also be extended to address other resources, such as Ethereum state size growth. By setting floating prices based on specific average usage targets, the pricing of different resources can be adjusted according to the network’s security situation.
Implementing multidimensional Gas and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) changes may introduce complexity and challenges, but it offers significant benefits in terms of scalability. Developers will need to redesign EVM functionality and adapt to the multi-price and multi-limit environment.
In conclusion, the introduction of multidimensional Gas in Ethereum poses a complex decision. Accepting more complexity at the EVM level can bring significant scalability benefits, but determining the best proposal for protocol economics and application developers remains a challenge. There is room for more elegant and efficient solutions to be proposed in the future.
Source: [Odaily星球日报](https://www.odaily.news/post/5195116)