Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has put forth a novel Ethereum Improvement Proposal known as EIP-7706, which centers on a revamped gas model tailored for transaction call data. Presently, Ethereum transactions incur two types of gas fees: one for transaction execution, covering computational efforts, and another for storage, representing the expense of storing data in "blobs."
EIP-7706 introduces a third form of gas dedicated specifically to call data—the crucial segment of an Ethereum transaction containing transferred data for smart contracts. This implies that Ethereum's blockchain will allocate a distinct fee for the data transmitted during a transaction, separate from the costs of executing contract code or storing data.
Under this new gas model, a transaction type will be introduced, providing max_basefee and priority_fee as vectors, offering values for execution gas, blob gas, and call data gas. Presently, adjustments to the base fee use separate mechanisms for transaction execution costs and data stored as blobs.
Buterin advocates for a uniform approach to managing all three forms of gas fees, aiming to mitigate transaction costs associated with data-intensive transactions that may not necessarily be computationally demanding. Should the proposal be accepted, the Ethereum network would be tasked with establishing call data costs independently from other expenses.
The proposed management of all three gas forms through a dynamic model would entail simultaneous modifications to the fees. By implementing a separate gas fee for call data, Buterin suggests that "theoretically the maximum call data size of a block would be significantly reduced, and basic economic analysis suggests that call data would become quite cheap on average."
Despite the initial motivations for transitioning from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to enhance scalability and reduce costs, the Ethereum network has grappled with gas fees for an extended period. However, these proposed changes and subsequent Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) have yet to fulfill the promised scalability improvements, though they have aided the network in various capacities.
