According to BlockBeats, on May 9, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin published an in-depth article discussing the importance and feasibility of introducing a multi-dimensional gas pricing mechanism in Ethereum. Buterin pointed out that Ethereum currently simplifies the pricing and quota of all resources into a single dimension of gas, which simplifies market design but also results in significant efficiency losses. If the network needs to manage n different resources, single-dimensional gas could lead to throughput losses as much as n times.
EIP-4844 first introduced multi-dimensional pricing in Ethereum, adding a dedicated Blob data area and setting independent prices and quotas for it. This improvement has reduced the cost of Rollup by 100 times, increased transaction volume by more than 3 times, and only slightly increased the theoretical maximum block volume. The article also discussed the necessity of adopting multi-dimensional gas when introducing storage proofs for stateless clients. Due to the quantum security risks of the Verkle tree scheme, the community hopes to switch to Binary Merkle trees and STARK, but their proof generation speed is much slower. By independently pricing and limiting storage access, cost issues caused by increasing gas prices can be avoided while ensuring stability.
Furthermore, Buterin proposed two ways to implement multi-dimensional gas pricing: 1. The simpler one is to set the resource limit for each transaction, that is, the gas for each transaction is priced based on the larger value of the consumed data and computing resources, as suggested by EIP-7623. 2. The ideal but more complex plan is to establish a dynamic adjustment mechanism similar to EIP-1559 for each resource. Buterin emphasized that introducing multi-dimensional execution gas would bring some complexity at the EVM level, but for the sake of safely enhancing the scalability of Ethereum L1, this trade-off is worth it. The community still needs to further explore more elegant designs in terms of the economy and developer-friendliness of the plan.
