ETH Co-founder Buterin Says L2 Transaction Fees Not Acceptable, Proposes Ambitious Ethereum Fee

KEY POINTS

Ryan Sean Adams sparks debate with tweets about "inexpenive" ETH fees
Shares a screenshot featuring different platforms with one charging $0.02 ETH fee
Vitalik Buterin says that ETH fees would be under $0.05

Ethereum blockchain co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the current Layer-2 transaction fees are not acceptable and proposed a rate that he thinks is "truly acceptable."

Buterin set an ambitious Ethereum fee and wrote that the current rate would not be "truly acceptable" until they are lowered under $0.05. The comment came after Ryan Sean Adams of the Bankless podcast shared an image of different fees of eight Ethereum Layer-2 platforms and used it to back his claim that the blockchain is "not expensive."

Buterin disagreed, noting that the fees should "get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable." The image featured in the tweet shows Ethereum fees ranging from $0.02 of Metis Network to $0.85 of Arbitrum One.

Vitalik Buterin - Co-founder of Ethereum, co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine Vitalik Buterin

While the only Layer-2 platform that meets Buterin's target transaction fee is Metis Network at $0.02, a token swap in the platform charges $0.15. Other platforms charge higher, including Loopring at $0.12, ZKSync at $0.19, Boba Network at $0.48, Optimism at $0.57 and Arbitrum One at $0.85.

Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we're definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 3, 2022

This is not the first time that the Ethereum co-founder floated cheaper Ethereum transaction fees. He first mentioned it in a 2017 interview and noted that "the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction."

4. Though I 100% stand by my comment that "the internet of money should not cost more than 5 cents per transaction". That was the goal in 2017, and it's still the goal now. It's precisely why we're spending so much time working on scalability.https://t.co/M326MtrlE0
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 1, 2022

The Canadian programmer reaffirmed this statement in January and said that "it's still the goal now," adding that "It's precisely why we're spending so much time working on scalability." The issue of the Ethereum fee was highlighted last weekend during the "Otherside" NFT drop.

The $310 million metaverse project of Yuga Labs saw a spike in the Ethereum price, where what typically costs $3.26 per transaction and $16.31 per token swap on Layer-1 skyrocketed to as much as $14,000 per mint. Investors who tried to get their hands on Otherdeeds NFT, a key to owning land in the metaverse, shelled out more than 60,000 ETH, or roughly $165 million, on fees.

Ethereum was trading down 0.24% at $2,840.59 with a 24-hour volume of $12,940,479,993 as of 4:41 a.m. ET on Wednesday, based on data from CoinMarketCap.