- The Merge will reduce Ethereum gas fees
According to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, the roadmap to low gas fees on Ethereum comes in five different phases: The Merge, The Surge, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge. The Merge does not have any notable impact on Ethereum’s network performance. Instead, it lays the foundation for implementing several scalability and performance-focused upgrades.
The Surge, the next in line in a post-Merge era, will reduce Ethereum network congestion and lower gas fees. The Surge will see the introduction of sharding — a scalability approach that splits the Ethereum network into smaller interconnected chains that offer higher throughput and low block times.
The Surge will also support the creation of rollups — layer-2 solutions that process transactions on their native chains before settling them on the more secure Ethereum network. While the move to proof-of-stake is an important milestone, it is not until developers implement The Surge sometime between 2023-2024 that Ethereum can theoretically offer lower gas fees and process more transactions per second.
- The Surge will eliminate the need for layer-2 solutions
The Surge will make layer-2 solutions more robust rather than eliminate them. Current layer-2 solutions, including rollups, are limited by the burden of handling large amounts of data. A sharded network shares the data handling load and allows rollups to scale up to 100,000 transactions per second.
A typical roll-up solution bundles several transactions executed on its native chain into one, which is submitted on the Ethereum mainnet. This “bundling” process reduces the amount of data required to process the transaction on Ethereum and frees up more blockspace.
Layer-2 solutions will see greater adoption as Ethereum moves from the monolithic blockchain model to a modular one. These solutions on different chains will offer cheap and fast transactions that derive their security from Ethereum’s main layer. However, the long-term roadmap indicates that rollups alone are not enough to scale throughput on Ethereum.
- Rollups are the only L2 solution needed to scale
Although rollups are an integral piece of the scaling solution puzzle, they are only ideal for transactions and applications that require limited computational power. They cannot simultaneously power several Web3 applications handling millions of transactions per minute.
In a theoretical scenario, rollups can only allow developers to bundle transactions that initially cost $1,000 in fees to as low as $200. Yet, even such significant cost savings amount to millions for a platform that plans to scale to the millions of users served by most Web2 apps.
The optimum approach to scaling the Web3 economy is a zero gas fee environment where users do not pay a fractional fee for every transaction. Achieving such scale using highly interoperable blockchains takes Web3 to the cusp of mainstream adoption.
FULL ARTICLE: Why The Future of Web3 Needs Zero Gas Fees