Vitalik Buterin proposed a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-7706) on the code hosting platform Github on the 13th. The proposal aims to add a new type of gas for transaction calldata. Farcaster, a decentralized social protocol, expressed the hope that this proposal would make the discussion of “multidimensional gas” more concrete.
The EIP-7706 proposal and its motivation were mentioned in the proposal. It states that this transaction type will provide max_basefee and priority_fee in vector form, applicable to three types of gas: “execution gas,” “blob gas,” and “calldata gas.” It also modifies the EIP-1559 proposal to ensure that all three types of gas adopt the same mechanism.
Additionally, in the motivation of the proposal, Vitalik mentioned that the main argument against Ethereum increasing gas limits, reducing calldata costs, and increasing Blob count is that the theoretical maximum space of Ethereum blocks is already too large to afford further increases in cost. Therefore, EIP-7706 introduces a separate gas market for calldata.
Theoretically, calldata size will be significantly reduced, and in average cases, calldata costs will also be greatly reduced.
Ethereum’s multidimensional gas roadmap was mentioned a few days before the proposal of EIP-7706. In Vitalik’s latest blog post, he also introduced the concept of “multidimensional gas” and discussed its benefits and prospects using Blobs after the Dencun upgrade as a practical example.
Stateless clients are a new type of client that can verify the blockchain with less storage or without storing any data. However, due to various limitations, using stateless clients can reduce the efficiency of blocks. In the blog post, Vitalik stated that the concept of multidimensional gas can limit and charge storage access separately, ensuring the average access volume of each block, and setting limits for each block to improve network security and efficiency.
Multidimensional gas can be adjusted for different issues without affecting Ethereum’s security, rather than adjusting based on the maximum usage of each block.
In a single-dimensional gas system, the gas cost of a transaction is determined based on the gas consumed by both data and computation. However, in a multidimensional gas system, the gas cost can be determined based on the main resources consumed by the transaction. This approach improves throughput while maintaining security.
Multidimensional EIP-1559 adjusts the basic fee of blobs through tracking the excess_blobs parameter to ensure that the average usage of blocks remains at the target level. When a block contains a number of blobs exceeding the target value, the basic fee increases to reduce usage, and vice versa. This pricing mechanism allows dynamic adjustment of transaction prices within the block to maintain a half-filled state. Trigger limits are also set to ensure reasonable competition for transactions.
Finally, Vitalik added in the blog post that once multidimensional gas is introduced, the complexity of the system will significantly increase. Therefore, Ethereum faces a complex choice of whether to accept more complexity on the EVM in exchange for scalability on Layer 2.