How Ethereum Plans to Address the High Gas Fees

Ethereum is undoubtedly the market leader in smart contracting. It is the home for DeFi, NFTs, and pretty much all other exciting developments that define crypto—or blockchain.

However, Ethereum has a scaling challenge—it can only process 15 TPS—a reason for the high gas fees standing at over $40 in early September 2021.

How are Ethereum developers planning to tackle this nagging problem?

There are many options on the table—including on-chain scaling by increasing block limit increment and changes brought by EIP-1559.

The 'good' problem is all intervening interventions have thus far been futile and frustrating for the end user. 

A long-lasting solution to this could be shifting to Layer-2 options that Arbitrum, ZK Rollups, and Optimism all have on offer.

Arbitrum is already live, accessible to all users following the mainnet launch in early September. It is a sidechain with a roll-up option existing parallel to the mainnet but linked to the base for security reasons.

Optimism is being trialed and is in Alpha, set for launch in due course.

Even so, the success of both viable scaling options depends on adoption. The more intensive dApps, mostly DEXes and NFT platforms, integrate, the highly likely Gas rates will drop in tandem.