Vitalik Buterin once again mentioned 5 cents transaction fee. When can it be achieved?

Ryan Sean Adams, host of the “Bankless” podcast, posted a screenshot of the average transaction fees of Ethereum’s eight layer 2 projects on Twitter.

Vitalik responded: "The average transaction fee of Ethereum needs to be less than 5 cents to be truly accepted. Of course, we are also working hard. At present, proto-danksharding technology may be a good solution."

The data in the above figure comes from L2fees.info, which compares the cost of Ethereum's layer1 network with the cost of layer2 built on top of it. The only layer2 solution that meets Vitalik's transaction fee of less than 5 cents is the Metis network, which costs 2 cents, but token swaps on the platform still cost $0.15. Apart from the lower price of Metis, the prices of other projects continue to rise, with Loopring, which ranks second, charging $0.08 per transaction, and Aztec, which ranks eighth, charging more than $2 per transaction, reaching $2.01. As of press time, Ethereum's layer-1 is currently relatively affordable, with a transaction fee of $2.74 per transaction and approximately $13.69 per token swap.

As early as in an interview in 2017, Vitalik said that "the cost of each transaction on the Internet of Money should not exceed 5 cents." This affordable transaction goal is one of his long-term goals. Vitalik also said in a long tweet on January 1 this year that reducing transaction costs to 5 cents is the goal for 2017 and is also the direction we are currently working towards. Ethereum is still solving its scalability solution.

Proto-danksharding

Danksharding is a new sharding design proposed for Ethereum that introduces some significant simplifications compared to previous designs. The main innovation introduced by Danksharding is the merged fee market: instead of a fixed number of shards, each with different blocks and different block proposers, in Danksharding there is only one proposer that has access to all transactions and all data for that slot.

Proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844) is a proposal to implement much of the underlying logic that makes up the full danksharding specification (e.g. transaction format, validation rules). Proto-sharding will enable a new transaction type called a "blob-carrying transaction" that carries 125KB worth of additional data (blobs) that cannot be accessed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This will help the network scale significantly in the short term while reducing congestion and, therefore, gas fees.

Although Ethereum’s roadmap is very flexible, the upgrade of the shard chain is expected to be completed sometime in 2023, after the mainnet merges with the beacon chain. According to previous news from BitTorrent, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko responded on Twitter: “The Ethereum merger will not be completed in June, but will be completed in 2022.”

Sharding chains provide a way to store data cheaply across the entire network, which reduces load, congestion, transaction fees, and speeds up transactions to a certain extent. Ethereum and its layer2 solutions are expected to benefit greatly from this. After the Ethereum merger and the deployment of sharding chains, the 5 cents transaction fee that Vitalik hopes for will no longer be out of reach.