TLDR
- Gas fees on Meter Network be reduced from current minimum of 500 GWEI to a minimum of 100 GWEI
- The gas reduction will follow a review period of 3 months to gauge the impact on transaction volume and GameFI, NFT adoption
Background
Vitalik Buterin famously said in a 2017 interview – ‘Transactions on the internet should not cost more than 5 cents’
At Meter Foundation, while our core focus is on the growth and adoption of Meter Network as a public goods platform; we aim to abide by our first principle of freedom and fairness.
Fair growth is inclusive growth!
So while our recent efforts have led to a surge of numerous DEFI and GameFI applications adopting Meter Network as their new destination, the higher cost of transactions on Meter Network was noticeable for projects – primarily GameFI and NFTs – moving their home base from Polygon.
Through this proposal, we aim to reduce gas costs on Meter Network to propel broader adoption of the network.
Historical Network Analysis
A comparison of historical gas cost analysis of Meter Network with 2 other major blockchain networks (BSC and Polygon) over the last 1 years looks like below;
Comparing the publicly available gas data, we notice that:
Meter Gas Fees are 2x as costly as Polygon (at 193 GWEI) and 0.15x cheaper than gas costs on BSC (at 7 GWEI)
A correction of 50% to accommodate higher network activity on Polygon and BSC yields below results:
Meter Gas Fees are 4x as costly as Polygon (at 100 GWEI) and 0.30x cheap than gas costs on BSC (at 3 GWEI)
Detailed data analysis can be found here.
Proposal
We propose that the gas fees on Meter Network be reduced from current minimum of 500 GWEI to a minimum of 100 GWEI.
Important Considerations:
- This dramatic 1/5th reduction in gas price will open doors for:
- Significantly higher GameFI, NFT transaction volume
- More GameFI, NFT dapps porting to Meter Network
- The reduction tries to strike a balance between:
- Lower fees than competing networks with higher adoption, paving way for dapps on those networks to shift to Meter
- A deficiency in network revenue that we believe can be compensated by the greater adoption of Network ensuring that network fees and MTRG burn are not impacted substantially
Path Ahead
Review Period
The gas reduction from minimum 500 GWEI to minimum 100 GWEI will follow a review period of 3 months to gauge the impact on transaction volume and GameFI, NFT adoption. Any further change will follow the governance process.
Variable Gas Implementation
Meter Network will introduce ‘variable gas determination’ in the future as network activity increases.
The Promise of MTR
An important aspect to reemphasize to the Meter Community is the ability of MTR to ensure stable gas costs to its users.
Unlike other networks (BSC and Polygon in our comparisons above), the metastable nature of MTR will ensure that the gas costs are more predictable over a longer time horizon.
New Gas Fee Estimates
Let us revisit the gas costs in the earlier analysis.
With reduction in minimum GWEI from 500 to 100, the transaction costs directly reduce by a 1/5th
Meter Gas Fees are now 0.4x cheap than Polygon (at 193 GWEI) and 0.03x as cheap than gas costs on BSC (at 7 GWEI)
A correction of 50% to accommodate higher network activity on Polygon and BSC yields below results:
Meter Gas Fees are now 0.8x cheap than Polygon (at 100 GWEI) and 0.03x as cheap than gas costs on BSC (at 3 GWEI)
Note: The gas costs are averaged out for the dapps across known contracts. Based on Network gas fees, an estimate is made for Polygon and BSC transaction costs for the same gas utilized.
