Network congestion on the Ethereum network is a very real and present problem, which has led to even more serious and pressing problems. Users of the network, particularly small-time investors, have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to these difficulties because they have been the most affected. With prices growing, carrying out modest transactions on the top smart contracts network is becoming increasingly difficult.
The hefty costs and congestion have generated discussions on how to abolish them. Other developments in the works include the Consensus Layer (previously known as ETH 2.0) and other developer ideas. This time, it is Vitalik Buterin, the founder of atheneum, who suggests a solution to network congestion and, by implication, expensive network costs.
Some proposals to add "blob-carrying transactions" in a near-future hard fork, bringing higher scalability to rollups before full sharding is complete. https://t.co/oRTSwAC1oD
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 5, 2022
Blob-Carrying Ethereum Transactions
In a debate shared on the prominent social media platform Twitter, Vitalik Buterin and developer Tim Beiko proposed solutions to the problem of excessive network congestion. With the network’s adoption rising at a rate that the creators could not have predicted, it has become a competition to identify the best approach to scale the network appropriately. Buterin suggests a new feature termed “blob-carrying transactions” at this point.
Buterin notes that this feature will be introduced to a hard fork that will take place in the near future. In the interim, blob-carrying transactions would allow more scalability for rollups before the entire transition to the consensus layer. It is just a stop-gap measure till network sharing is introduced. This new functionality would be linked to both the Beacon block and the new consensus nodes joining the network.
“Until that point, this EIP provides a stop-gap solution by implementing the transaction structure that would be used in sharding but not sharding those transactions,” the founder explained. “Instead, they would simply be part of the beacon block and would need to be downloaded by all consensus nodes (but maybe erased after only a brief wait).”
When Is This Going to Happen?
The blob-carrying transactions may be used with the Shangai hard fork. It would provide a solution to the network’s ongoing mempool difficulties. Additionally, for blob transactions and standard transactions that transport a large amount of data, “raise the minimum increment for mempool replacement from 1.1x to 2x, reducing the number of resubmissions an attacker may conduct at any given fee level by 7x,” according to the notes.
Ethereum continues to have some of the highest fees in the space. Fees have been reported to go as high as $300 in some circumstances when the network is jammed owing to a high-profile NFT minting. Even the Layer 2 rollups created to assist consumers in dealing with the high transaction costs have seen their rates rapidly rise as they cannot meet demand.
On the pricing front, Ethereum is performing well as it continues to track the price of bitcoin closely. Both digital assets entered the weekend with pessimistic outlooks and emerged on a bull trend, with ETH’s price breaking above $3,000 for the first time.
