Vitalik Buterin Proposes Wallet Gas Fee As A Way To Support Developers

The co-creator and persona of Ethereum blockchain, Vitalik Buterin, lately suggested a hike in network gas fee as a method to support developers’ work. He suggested that the fraternity should back1 gas fees for dealings done through their wallets to assist financing the development, as per his Twitter profile.

For those who are not aware of the term, gas fees are essentially payments which are called in this blockchain to offset for the computational energy needed for validating transactions.

With regards to transactions, the payments would be extremely low as a fee of one gas (also referred to as gwei) translates to is less than one penny. As a matter of fact, U.S. $0.01 is actually equal to 73,000 gwei. Collectively, such a meager amount may not even get noticed, but Buterin wishes this modest fee could accumulate to $2 million a year and enable developers to focus on their efforts.

This would hardly increase gas costs by roughly 7%, and they are quite small even now, according to the Ethereum creator, but it could pile up to a substantial amount of money in a continuous manner. This plan would also cover the grants provided by the Ethereum Foundation on a yearly basis and actually result in no tweaks to how much people are spending.

He affirmed, however, that he chose not to make this fee a compulsory rule, but an unofficial norm that wallet users would accept out of their own interest. According to him, even now, there exists a high degree of confidence among all market participants, so this plan could easily work.

Obviously, the response to the increase in gas charges would be mixed. The fraternity was divided, and although some defended the idea, others seemed to detest it. One user, for example, highlighted that MultiBit, a Bitcoin wallet, attempted a similar plan, but failed to enforce the fee system. The main problem, according to the user, was that crypto users were not passionate about shelling out for a service that was previously free.

It didn’t make a difference that the service fees were not significant, because the users were not willing to pay fees. The company eventually had to withdraw the fees to avoid losing its customers. The wallet development nearly stopped because people disagreed with the fee hike.

However, Buterin disclosed that the response from the crypto fraternity as of now has been immensely encouraging. As per Buterin, many Ethereum wallets might begin charging soon.