Ethereum developers are expected to focus on improving the scalability of the network following the implementation of the much-anticipated merge upgrade (The Merge) in September. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said recently that with the growth of network efficiency and the improvement of Rollup technology in the future, the transaction cost of Ethereum Layer 2 is expected to drop to $0.02, and cryptocurrency payments will once again become mainstream.
Vitalik Buterin said in his keynote speech at the “Korea Blockchain Week” today (8th), “The craze for cryptocurrency payments has subsided a bit after 2018. Obviously, transaction fees are one of the reasons.”
In his view, the last hurdle to lower transaction fees is blockchain data compression.
Vitalik Buterin pointed out that there is ongoing solid work related to Rollup, such as Ethereum’s second-layer solution Optimism, which reduces the data size and cost in blockchain transactions by introducing a zero-byte compression algorithm. He continued,
The current transaction fee for Rollup is usually between $0.25, sometimes $0.10, and in the future, as the efficiency of Rollup continues to improve, it may drop to $0.05, or even as low as $0.02. Cheaper and more affordable, it’s a total game changer.
Vitalik Buterin, whose long-term goal for many years has been to keep transaction fees as low as possible, said earlier this year that Ethereum Layer 2 transaction fees would need to be under 5 cents to be considered an “acceptable” range, and earlier this year. Previously, in 2017, he made a similar point, when Vitalik Buterin pointed out that “Internet currency should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction.”
