According to Cointelegraph: Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, and Ethereum Foundation researcher, Toni Wahrstätter, have presented five potential techniques to reduce Ethereum's maximum block size. Aimed at optimizing the blockchain for a "rollup-centric roadmap," the proposed designs center on raising block gas limits and escalating the cost of calldata, all within an Ethereum framework.
In the light of growing rollups usage, Buterin and Wahrstätter argue that the present use of block space is not optimized. They noticed that the effective block size has doubled over the past year, which may be attributed to the increased utilization of Ethereum by rollups and trends like Inscriptions.
Their proposed solutions aim to regulate the maximum block size and fluctuations, thus creating more room for future data blobs. They suggest an increase to the block gas limit and the price for nonzero calldata bytes. The block gas limit restricts gas expenditure on transactions or smart contracts execution per block, preventing too large blocks from affecting network performance. Calldata, which requires gas, adds to the network load.
One simple solution recommends boosting the calldata cost from 16 to 42 gas, downsizing the maximum block size from 1.78 megabytes to around 0.68 megabytes. This approach, while it makes room to raise the block gas limit, may discourage calldata use for data availability, potentially impacting apps that depend on extensive calldata for on-chain proofs, like StarkNet.
Alternate options involve balancing the higher calldata cost with decreased opcode costs, capping calldata per block, creating a unique calldata fee market, or introducing an "EVM loyalty bonus" to offset the impact on calldata-heavy applications.
While each method may achieve the desired reduction in maximum block size, they concluded that simplest solution (raising the calldata cost to 42 gas) might seem like too superficial an approach, and creating a separate fee market could overcomplicate the system.
They suggest that a more balanced approach could be achieved by escalating the calldata cost while lowering the cost of some operations or perhaps introducing incentives for calldata use.
