Vitalik and Ethereum Foundation researchers propose 5 designs to reduce Ethereum’s maximum block size

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation are considering at least five ways to reduce Ethereum’s maximum block size in order to optimize the blockchain towards a “rollup-centric roadmap.” On February 5, Vitalik and Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter said that with the mid- to long-term focus on rollups, some believe that the way block space is used has not yet been optimized, noting that the effective block size has increased over the past 12 months. Basically doubled. “This may be a result of trends such as more and more rollups starting to use Ethereum for data processing and inscriptions,” the pair explained. This blog post discusses five different solutions (with varying levels of complexity) to increase the block gas limit and suppress calldata usage, thereby reducing the maximum block size and variance to make room for more data blocks in the future . One of the first simpler solutions proposed in the article is to increase the calldata cost from 16 Gas to 42 Gas, which will reduce the maximum block size from 1.78 MB to 0.68 MB. This will make room for increasing the block gas limit. However, Vitalik believes this would inhibit the use of calldata for data availability and negatively impact applications such as Starknet that require large amounts of calldata for on-chain attestation; a second solution might be to increase calldata costs but reduce other opcode costs. Another solution is to limit the call data per block as suggested in EIP-4488. However, this may also inhibit the use of calldata for data availability and impact applications that rely heavily on it. Therefore, creating a separate call data fee market can be used to potentially increase the gas limit. The price using calldata will automatically adjust based on the amount of demand, but the disadvantage is that it increases the complexity of analysis and implementation. A final idea is to provide an "EVM loyalty bonus" to compensate applications with high calldata. The pair concluded that simply increasing the calldata cost to 42 might be "too blunt" and that creating a separate fee market might "add too much complexity." Buterin had previously proposed limiting the call data of each block in 2021 to reduce gas costs. (Cointelegrap)