Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has reportedly put up a proposal for a new limit on the overall transaction calldata in a block, in a bid to bring down the transaction calldata gas fee on the network. 

Specifically, Buterin – via a post on the Ethereum Magicians forum, EIP-4488 – reportedly emphasized the issues related to the high transaction cost on layer-one blockchains for rollups, as well as the significant sum of time for data sharding deployment and implementation. 

“Hence, a short-term solution to further cut costs for roll-ups and to incentivize an ecosystem-wide transition to a rollup-centric Ethereum is desired.”

While the entrepreneur reportedly mentioned a different measure that could bring down the gas fees parameters, at no expense of imposing a limit to the block size, he predicted security-related trouble in lowering the calldata gas fee from 16 to 3. 

“[This] would increase the maximum block size to 10M bytes and push the Ethereum p2p networking layer to unprecedented levels of strain and risk breaking the network.”

Buterin then generated a decrease-cost-and-cap proposal, with the primary target of completing the task of bringing down never-before-achieved levels of strain and risk breaking the network, with expectations of “1.5 MB will be sufficient while preventing most of the security risk.” 

“It’s worth rethinking the historical opposition to multi-dimensional resource limits and considering them as a pragmatic way to simultaneously achieve moderate scalability gains while retaining security.” He further issued a remark dedicated to the Ethereum community. 

Should it receive the go-ahead, the implementation of the proposal will need a scheduled network upgrade, resulting in a backward-incompatible gas repricing for the Ethereum ecosystem. 

The update means that it will be mandatory for miners to stay in compliance with a new rule, which stops the inclusion of new transactions into a block when the total calldata size hits the maximum.