According to the survey, Ethereum miners are disapproving of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, put forward by leading network developers, aimed at introducing a new fee model.
Eight of the nine mining projects that participated in the EIP 1559 community survey responded negatively to the proposal. At the same time, seven out of nine respondents said they would refuse to implement EIP if it is included in a future hard fork.
Developers began discussing the proposal in the summer when online transaction fees soared. EIP 1559 aims to address problems with the current transaction fee model that forces users to pay more than necessary. EIP 1559’s proposed fee structure autonomously adapts to network requirements and allows users to pay only the fees they actually need to complete a transaction.
The survey involved 25 Ethereum projects, most of which chose to remain anonymous, said ConsenSys product manager and survey creator Tim Beiko. According to him, exchanges or wallets did not participate in the survey. In general, 42% of the respondents gave a positive or negative assessment of the proposal, the rest of the respondents remained neutral or did not express their position.
EIP 1559 was first proposed by Vitalik Buterin in 2018. The main idea of the proposal is that it will make the commission market more predictable and reduce network congestion. EIP 1559 does not promise lower transaction fees. Miners will still be making profits under the new model, but they will be limited compared to the current setup. This will add a deflationary mechanism to the Ethereum network.
However, the concerns of miners are understandable. Recall that they earned $ 166 million in commissions in September – a record amount in the entire history of Ethereum. The boom in the DeFi market has been a major driver of miner revenue growth.
At the moment, the developers are still considering the EIP. They will not include it in the update until after the Berlin hard fork, which was suspended in July, is completed. In addition, developers have raised concerns about the EIP 1559 itself in terms of its effectiveness and changes in developer tools. Some Ethereum clients, like Nethermind and Besu, have started rolling out EIP on testnets. But other clients, including Geth and OpenEthereum, are awaiting the final specification before launching EIP on the testnet.
Recall that in September, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed to triple the cost of smart contracts that update the state of the network to solve the problem of exponential growth of fees.
