Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has believed that layer-2 transaction fees need to be under $0.05 to be “truly acceptable.”
It has been reported that Buterin made the latest comments in response to a Twitter post from the “Bankless” podcast host Ryan Sean Adams, who shared a screenshot of the average transaction fees for eight Ethereum layer-2 platforms.
However, the data is from L2fees.info, a website that compares the cost of Ethereum’s layer-1 network in comparison to layer-2s built on top of it. The only layer-2 to meet Buterin’s desired transaction fee under $0.05 is the Metis Network at $0.02, a token swap on the platform still costs $0.14.
The report said that fees sharply increase from there, at $0.12 per transaction on Loopring and going all the way to $1.98 per transaction on the Aztec Network. Ethereum’s layer-1 is relatively affordable at present at $3.26 per transaction and a whopping $16.31 per token swap, that only lasts until Yuga Lab’s releases another collection of nonfungible tokens (NFTs) where fees can skyrocket to $14,000 per mint.
Likewise, Adams emphasized the importance of layer-2s for keeping Ethereum affordable, noting that “this is Ethereum and it’s not expensive,” but Buterin suggested it wasn’t there yet.
He said:
“Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we’re definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!”
Buterin’s affordable transaction goal is a long-held one that he first stated during an interview in 2017 that “the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction.” In January, Buterin said he still stood by this goal “100%” as part of a lengthy Twitter thread going over some of the key things he’s said or written over the past 10 years.
Thus, he added:
“That was the goal in 2017, and it’s still the goal now. It’s precisely why we're spending so much time working on scalability.”
Source: Cointelegraph