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This article was originally written by IPFS Force Zone This article is a summary of Filecoin creator Juan Benet’s sharing on the topic of Filecoin and EIP-1559: In the Filecoin network, gas is a concept used to measure the usage of computing resources on the chain. The resources on the chain are limited and costly. For the Filecoin network, it is necessary to clarify who needs to bear the cost of these resources and weigh how to use these resources more efficiently. For example, for the right to use on-chain resources, a "first price auction" can be conducted. Participants use higher prices to encourage miners to execute their transactions. When miners produce blocks, they can package messages with high bids into the blocks and collect fees. Given a block size cap or a gas limit that can be traded in a block, miners prioritize messages so that they can obtain higher returns. Although simple in concept, the first-price auction approach has many flaws. It can be complex to implement and can cause participants to overpay. It can also easily lead to bad behavior due to network congestion. It also rewards miners with all gas fees, ignoring the fact that non-mining participants in the network must also expend resources to process each transaction. Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-1559 is a standard developed to address these issues. Its main innovation is the introduction of a base fee associated with each block. The base fee fluctuates with network congestion, pushing network traffic back to the target level. Under EIP-1559, transaction creators specify a fee cap (the maximum they are willing to pay per unit of gas to include this transaction). If the fee cap is less than the base fee of the block, it cannot be included in the block. Since the base fee is destroyed, transaction creators also specify a tip, which is given to the miner as an incentive to include the message. Under this scheme, transaction creators can ensure that their high-priority messages are still included in the block while paying a much smaller fee. Integration of EIP-1559 in Filecoin EIP-1559 has many compelling properties that align well with Filecoin’s design: Efficiency. EIP-1559 builds a more efficient model for setting and calculating gas; User experience. Estimation and fee setting are much easier than the first-price auction method; Critical message throughput. WindowPost messages in Filecoin are time-critical and must be processed in a way that is highly resistant to congestion. EIP-1559 provides higher reliability and throughput for such messages; Transactions reward the network. The entire network bears the cost of processing transactions and should be compensated accordingly.
For these reasons, Filecoin incorporated EIP-1559 into its core protocol, Filecoin's block structure Tipsets, with slight modifications. Its transactions are on-chain before execution, and the actual gas usage cannot be determined until this happens. Therefore, Filecoin requires users to provide estimated transaction limits. But in order to properly align incentives, the estimated amount will be subject to an "excess penalty" if it exceeds a certain limit. Current Situation and Summary EIP-1559 has been implemented and exists on the Filecoin mainnet. Currently, 100,000 to 150,000 FIL are consumed by the Filecoin network every day. EIP-1559 has achieved at least two key victories: Fast lanes for high-value transactions. Sometimes stored messages can threaten the price of more time-sensitive WindowPost messages. However, as expected, integrating EIP-1559 provides Filecoin participants with a straightforward mechanism to resolve this congestion issue without always paying a high price; Network capacity management. So far, EIP-1559’s base fee mechanism has done a good job of keeping network capacity at 100% of its target.
Over time, transaction creators have also gotten better at estimating the amount of gas their transactions will require, reducing overestimation of consumption in the long term. There is still some room for improvement: the base fee varies widely and its rate of change curve is steep. This is due to the increased congestion of the network as storage increases. In the past, this has also caused the price of important WindowPost messages to be pushed up. The Filecoin community could investigate a number of approaches to address these pricing issues: Gas control plane. One possible way to solve network congestion is to separate the control plane from the data plane, create dedicated channels for transactions, and leave a portion of each block for critical specific messages; Message type fee structure. Another way to solve this problem might be to reduce the cost of WindowPost, or increase the cost of other messages (especially Pre/ProveCommit messages); Basic fee change rate. The basic fee rate change curve is too steep over time. Other methods unrelated to the gas model can be introduced to help alleviate congestion and make the curve change smoother. Expanded proofs. Ideas for expanding Filecoin’s proof mechanism include batch verification of SNARKs to reduce the amount of verification that needs to be done in advance; Scaling consensus. Given the current congestion rate, Filecoin may need to accelerate the adoption and implementation of the sharding mechanism in Filecoin.
Looking ahead, there is a lot of potential data analysis work to come from the achievements of the Filecoin network to date, and there is an opportunity to collaborate with other researchers and the blockchain community to build on the ideas of EIP-1559. Some possible areas of research include introducing queuing ideas into the gas model. There are also ways to guarantee the quality of service for certain messages and transactions and explore ways to introduce encrypted transactions into the blockchain, which can be performed at some point in the future. |
