The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin has proposed that a new limit be imposed on the total transaction calldata per block, as this would be helpful in reducing the overall cost of calldata gas on the Ethereum network. The post from Buterin appeared on EIP-4488, the Ethereum Magicians forum, and sheds some light on the concerns of high transaction fees associated with one-layer blockchains and significant amount of time that’s taken for deploying and implementing data sharding. Buterin said that it would be a short-term solution for cutting costs further for rollups and to give incentives for a transition to a roll-up centric Ethereum throughout the ecosystem.

The entrepreneur also came up with an alternative that could help in decreasing the gas parameters without adding any further limits to the block size. However, he disclosed that there could be some security concerns if they were to decrease the cost of the calldata from 16 to 3. He stated that doing so would mean increasing the maximum block size to 10M bytes. Plus, it would put strain of unprecedented levels on the Ethereum p2p networking layer, thereby increasing the risk of breaking the network. Therefore, the Ethereum co-founder came up with a proposal that involves a decrease in cap and cost and can reduce the unprecedented levels of strain that could break the network.

He thinks that 1.5MB would be enough and most of the security risk can also be prevented. When advising the Ethereum community, he said that rethinking the historical opposition was worth it where multi-dimensional resource limits are concerned and they should be regarded as a pragmatic way of retaining the security and simultaneously achieving moderate scalability. If the proposal is accepted, it would need a scheduled network upgrade and this implementation would see the Ethereum ecosystem experience backward-incompatible gas repricing. 

Moreover, another consequence of the upgrade for the miners would be to comply with a new rule that would prevent them from adding any new transactions into a block once the call data size has reached the maximum limit. The proposal stated that the worst-case scenario that miners may have to deal with is a theoretical long-run maximum of ~3.0 TB per year, or ~1,262,861 bytes for every 12-second slot. But, it is important to note that the community is also discussing a few other options. These include implementing a soft limit. Some of them have also expressed concerns about congestion during the sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

These require users to pay a higher total fee as compensation for the lack of execution gas. Due to the increase in gas fees, a number of users have left the Ethereum network for lowering the cost of networks that are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. On November 4th, the data showed that it could cost as much as $50 in terms of Ether for approving a token that could be used on the Uniswap decentralized finance (defi) protocol. Furthermore, the onboarding of new users has also prompted two-layer solutions, which were advertised to solve the higher fee dilemma, has pushed them to charge higher fee.