Is the gas cost of Ethereum L2 high?

Yesterday, Arbitrum was hotly discussed because of its extremely high gas fee, and an interesting joke circulated, "Why is l2 better than l1? It turns out that the gas fee is twice that of l1."

The situation this meme points out is not common, but it does point out a problem with l2.

Why is there L2? Why does Ethereum have so many L2s? Because the POW chains of Bitcoin and Ethereum have high gas fees and are congested. This year, when APE launched the Metaverse plot, the gas price of Ethereum once reached 5,000. Recently, the gas price of Ethereum has fallen below 10.

With such a low gas price, many POS chains and L2 chains have lost their competitiveness.

The emergence of Ethereum challengers and l2 chains is to solve Ethereum's high gas fees and congestion, but in the current environment, the gas fee of l2 is already higher than that of the Ethereum main network. The main manifestation is that Arbitrum is launching an interactive competition, and such frequent interactions have successfully made the gas fee on the Arbitrum chain more than twice that of Ethereum.

Why?

Gas fee is a necessity for users to bear the server resources, and it is also an important factor in regulating the transaction process. Ethereum has switched from the POW chain to the POS chain. In the gas pricing, only the gas price of the consensus layer will change.

The gas prices of the newly emerged POS chains, including L2, which are challengers of Ethereum, are many orders of magnitude different from those of POW on Ethereum.

For example, when the gas price of Ethereum is 10gwei, the gas price on polygon may be 1/1000 of that. This is the case for most Ethereum challengers.

The gas fee is the product of gas consumption and gas price. The chain uses gas fees to calibrate the consumption of on-chain transaction resources. Related to it is the size of on-chain transactions and resource consumption. For example, in the code editing of a contract, there will be execution codes in the contract. Different execution codes have different pricing. These execution code combinations determine the gas consumption of contract execution.

When it comes to the interaction of multiple chains, for example, from the definition of l2 itself.

L2 exists to expand the capacity of L1. For Arbitrum, it is to migrate Ethereum transactions to L2, but many user operations will return to L1.

The transaction data on l2 must be returned to the l1 chain, which means that under this requirement, the size of the l2 transaction proof determines the amount of gas used when the user operates the l2-l1 contract. Some users have pointed out that Arbitrum's transaction compression is not enough.

However, the public chain logic of l2 makes l2 hope that users will not return to l1 after coming in, and only do transactions on l2.

The role of the l2 chain is the same as that of other public chains. Its design and requirements for gas fees should be more in line with the properties of the POS chain, low gas, and high concurrency chain.

So how do we design a gas pricing mechanism?

Let’s look at the problems that arbitrum has encountered this time.

It is said that Arbitrum raised the gas price by setting the minimum gas consumption value for contract interaction in a single project, GMX. This theory is completely eliminated in the gas design of public chains. Dapp contracts and chain basic protocols are completely separate. Even if a Dapp contract execution sets the minimum gas consumption, it may be for smoother contract execution packaging, but Dapp cannot change the gas price of the chain as a whole.

We checked the gas pricing of arbitrum, which has a separate gas system arbgas, which indicates a minimum value on the chain and can also set a payment gas limit.

However, Arbitrum's gas pricing is similar to Ethereum's pricing in that it includes price bidding, which is called gasbid. The highest payable gas fee set by the trader is the gasbid. As more and more transactions are made, the gasbid will continue to rise.

There is also an interesting rule on Arbitrum that the L2 account of the transaction sender must have at least gasbid multiplied by maxgas in ETH. Although this setting will make many transactions impossible to complete, from the user experience, it seems likely to make users fall into a state of constantly pushing up emotions.

If you want to reduce gas, those market game methods are unlikely to work. The only and best way is to reduce the order of magnitude of gas price calculation and reduce the gas consumption of contract execution code.

The chain that uses the POS consensus does not have the same resource consumption and resource cost as POW, so the pricing will inevitably be much lower. In addition, the network will issue tokens, and the tokens will also have a corresponding part to maintain network operations. Therefore, in such an volatile market, the gas fee will not have a clear definition and standard for the time being.

If other chains follow Ethereum, they will definitely have extremely high gas fees, because the basic network operation does not consider the market. New L1s like Harmony also had ridiculously high gas fees due to a large number of transactions. Do we need other pioneers to solve the gas fee problem? The answer is of course yes, but when no one solves it, we can only choose to wait and endure it for the time being.