Layer-two Fees Still Too Expensive According to Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has responded to a tweet regarding layer-two fees suggesting that many of the networks are still too expensive.

On May 3, Ethereum advocate and industry analyst Ryan Sean Adams posted a screenshot of the leading layer-two platforms and their respective network fees.

The highest was Arbitrum One at $0.85 to send ETH and $1.19 for a token swap, while the lowest was the Metis Network at $0.02 to send ETH and $0.15 for a token swap. Buterin replied to the tweet stating:

“Needs to get under $0.05 to be truly acceptable imo. But we’re definitely making great progress, and even proto-danksharding may be enough to get us there for a while!”

Buterin has reiterated his views that “the Internet of Money should not cost 5 cents per transaction,” as stated in an interview in 2017.

Proto-Danksharding was introduced by Buterin in February with EIP-4844 as a means to improve the Ethereum Consensus Layer sharding mechanism. The upgrade enables a new type of transaction called a “blob-carrying transaction” that carries extra data not accessed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Ethereum fees still too high  

According to L2fees, the current cost of sending ETH on the leading layer-two networks is between $0.02 and $1.96 so there is still some way to go before the average comes down to what Vitalik thinks is acceptable.

That said, they are still all cheaper than sending on layer-one Ethereum which currently costs around $2.50 on average according to Etherscan. BitInfoCharts reported a much higher average transaction fee of around $16 on May 3 so Ethereum is still too expensive for everyday usage (unless you’re a whale).

Average gas fees spiked to an all-time high of over $200 on May 1 when Yuga Labs launched its latest NFT collection, sparking more outrage from the crypto community.  

Layer-Two TVL drops

According to the L2beat layer-two tracker, the total value locked across all L2 networks has fallen to just over $6 billion. This marks an 18% retreat since the beginning of April when it was at an all-time high of $7.4 billion.

Arbitrum is the market leader with 57% of that TVL which is somewhat surprising since it is one of the most expensive L2 networks to use. The dYdX exchange is in second place with a 16% market share or just under $1 billion locked up while Optimism has 10% of the market with around $622 million in TVL.