Vitalik Buterin Claims Rollups Like Optimism, Arbitrum, ZkSync Are Far From Optimal

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a tweet on Friday claims the present-day rollups are not optimized to reduce fixed gas fees and costs per transaction. Despite some obvious solutions to reduce Ethereum gas fees and transaction speed, these are early times and rollups require more improvement in terms of fixed costs and per transaction costs.

The drawbacks of Ethereum currently are high gas fees and slow transaction speed, the Merge looks to solve these issues by increasing transaction speed, improving efficiency, and minimizing transaction costs. In fact, Ethereum will take a “rollup-centric roadmap” to improve the network’s scalability.

Vitalik Buterin Finds Ethereum Rollups Not Fully Optimized

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a tweet agrees rollups available today are not fully optimized and needs improvement in both fixed costs and per-transaction costs.

“Still a lot of room to improve both fixed costs and per-transaction costs. Very much early days in terms of how many optimizations that are easy to find theoretically haven’t yet actually been deployed.”

Rollups are scalability solutions that cut blockchain transaction costs by moving computation and data storage off-chain. Thus, reducing costs and increasing transaction speed. Some of the best Ethereum rollups are Optimism, Arbitrum, and zkSync. However, the fixed costs and per-transaction costs are still higher.

According to a Dune dashboard, high fixed gas cost per batch and variable gas cost per transaction for Optimism, Arbitrum, and zkSync are having 10x more gas costs per batch than Vitalik estimated in his article on rollups.

According to Vitalik, an ERC20 token transfer costs around 45000 gas, while in a rollup it takes nearly 16 bytes of on-chain space and costs under 300 gas.

Ethereum Merge follows Surge, Verge, Purge, and Spurge phases. Vitalik has taken a rollups-centric approach to increase scalability using shards, optimize transaction data storage using verkle trees, and other upgrades.

ETH Price Skyrockets over $1700

Ethereum (ETH) price rallies on bullish momentum as the Merge date comes near. Today, it has jumped over the $1700 level, making a high of $1774 for the first time in the last 6 weeks. The ETH price is up more than 5% in the last 24 hours.

The Ethereum rally is driving Ethereum Classic (ETC) as well as the staked Ethereum rally. However, the bullish price action will fade off before the Merge as detailed in a previous article.

As Ethereum will become deflationary after the Merge, the power usage to reduce by 99%. Thereafter, a price rally may be seen after 6 months of the Merge.