Ethereum Creator Wants Wallet Fee To Fund Devs

Vitalik Buterin, whose brainchild is the Ethereum blockchain project, reportedly proposed the idea of increasing user fees on the network. His reason behind the proposal is to support developers with the much-needed funding, one that is sustainable enough.

Support In The Ethereum Ecosystem

According to the official report, Buterin wants people to consider supporting a certain community norm. It is where both client and wallet devs can charge at least 1 gwei or gas fee specifically for transactions sent via their wallet. The executive made known of his proposal through the social media site Twitter.

Gas fees that are denominated in gwei, by essence, are payments made by users in order to compensate for the computational energy. The latter, on the other hand, is required when it comes to processing and validating transactions on the ETH blockchain.

Buterin suggests that a flat payment of a single gwei (73,000 gwei is to $0.01), which will work as a “one-off” payment, should be made for transactions made through Ethereum wallets. From there, it should be collectively raised up to $2 million within a year.

Treating The Fee As A Norm

The ETH blockchain project creator added that it would only come with a cost of increasing average user gas costs, which is believed to be around seven percent. This figure is sufficient already to raise the said amount and is even non-institutionally biased, sustainable, and market-based. It is the much-needed funding for the client and/or wallet developers.

Buterin further said that it is stable enough to cover the entire Ethereum Foundation grants to date. What is more, there is still a lot of room to spare.

The executive stressed the idea that in the Ethereum space, the fee must be treated more than a norm than a mandate. He explained that this process should be implemented with ease, especially since users and their respective Ethereum wallets have established “a high degree of trust.” This move, according to him, could avoid the possibility of “a bad wallet,” which is responsible for stealing user money.

Mixed Reactions From The Community

As far as responses from the community are concerned, they are reportedly mixed. Some believe that this proposal of his would not necessarily work, citing MultiBit as a precautionary tale. It is worth noting that MultiBit did it before with its Bitcoin wallet. Unfortunately, it failed to implement a fee, let alone prolong the process that has similar qualities to Buterin’s proposal.

A user responded that users were simply not accepting of the idea of paying for something, especially since it was free before. And without the existence of substantial funding for both engineering and support, the wallet’s development eventually ceased.