Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum Block Size Reduction

Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation are exploring ways to optimize Ethereum’s blockchain for a rollup-centric roadmap.

In an effort to optimize the blockchain for a “rollup-centric roadmap,” Vitalik Buterin, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, and the Ethereum Foundation are now examining at least five different approaches to shrink the maximum block size of Ethereum.

Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter, researchers at the Ethereum Foundation, stated on February 5 that the utilization of block space is not yet optimum, despite the fact that the effective block size has nearly quadrupled over the course of the previous year.

In the medium and long run, the prioritization of rollups has led to this situation. Vitalik Buterin and Wahrstätter explained that this could be the result of an increasing number of rollups beginning to use Ethereum for distributed ledger technology (DA) and trends such as inscriptions.

This blog article discusses five alternative methods. These techniques vary in complexity and aim to increase block gas limitations and discourage the usage of call data. Reducing the maximum block size and variance would enable the creation of more data blobs in the future.

“By increasing the block gas limit and the price for nonzero calldata bytes, a smaller and less variable block size can be achieved, making space to add more blobs in the future.”

The “ethereum gas limit” sets the maximum quantity of gas that can be spent on executing smart contracts or block chain transaction within each block. Setting a limit helps to ensure that blocks do not get excessively large, which could have a negative influence on the performance and synchronization of the network.

Call data, which uses gas, increases demand on the network, prompting a search for solutions that can increase the gas limit without compromising the network’s safeguards. Increasing the call data cost from 16 to 42 gas is one of the first and more straightforward fixes that Buterin and Wahrstatter have proposed.

This would result in a reduction in the maximum block size from 1.78 megabytes to 0.68 megabytes. If this were to occur, there would be room to raise the limit for the block gas.

On the other hand, Vitalik Buterin contends that this would impede the utilization of calldata for data availability and would have a detrimental effect on applications such as StarkNet that require a substantial amount of calldata for on-chain proofs.

Instead, a feasible alternative would be to raise the price of call data while simultaneously lowering the cost of other opcodes. Instructions in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) describe which calculations should be carried out and are known as opcodes or operation codes.

On the other hand, calldata represents the data provided as input to a smart contract function call. Another approach suggested in the Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP)-4488 is to limit the amount of call data that can be stored in a single block.

It is possible that this will have a negative impact on applications that are significantly reliant on call data and may also discourage the use of call data for data availability. Consequently, the establishment of a distinct call-data cost market, similar to the manner in which data blobs are managed, has the potential to be utilized in order to raise gas restrictions.

The cost of using call data would be adjusted in a manner that is automatically determined by the level of demand already present. The disadvantage, on the other hand, is that the analysis and implementation will become more complicated.

When it comes to compensating apps that rely heavily on call data, the last proposal is to pay an “EVM loyalty bonus.” Incorporating these enormous data packets, known as blobs, into Ethereum’s blockchain will improve the efficiency of data handling and storage. The EIP-4844 Dencun update will be responsible for their implementation.

On the other hand, the two individuals came to the conclusion that merely increasing the cost of call data to 42 could be considered “too blunt an approach,” while the establishment of different charge markets could “add too much complexity.”

“A balanced solution could be to increase the cost of calldata while reducing the cost of some operations, or perhaps moving towards a model that offers incentives for using calldata inside the EVM.”

In the year 2021, Vitalik Buterin introduced the idea of imposing call data restrictions per block in order to reduce the cost of gas. For the purpose of enhancing the throughput of the Ethereum network, Vitalik Buterin proposed in January that the gas cap be increased by 33 percent to 40 million.

Increasing the gas limit makes it possible to conduct more transactions within each block, which, in theory, will result in an increase in the network’s overall throughput and capacity. However, this also results in an increase in the stresses placed on the hardware, as well as the possibility of network spam and attacks.