In response to a tweet about layer-two costs, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that many of the networks are still excessively costly.
Ryan Sean Adams, an Ethereum supporter and industry expert, shared a snapshot of the top layer-two platforms and their network fees on May 3.
Arbitrum One had the highest fee of $0.85 for sending ETH and $1.19 for a token swap, while the Metis Network had the lowest fee of $0.02 for sending ETH and $0.15 for a token swap. Buterin responded to the tweet with the following:
“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!”
Ethereum fees still at the top
Buterin has maintained his position in a 2017 interview that “the Internet of Money should not cost 5 cents per transaction.”
Buterin introduced Proto-Danksharding with EIP-4844 in February as a way to enhance the Ethereum Consensus Layer sharding method. The update allows a new form of transaction known as a “blob-carrying transaction,” which carries additional data that the Ethereum Virtual Machine does not have access to (EVM).
According to L2fees, the current cost of transferring ETH on the major layer-two networks is between $0.02 and $1.96, indicating that there is still a long way to go before the average reaches the level that Vitalik considers acceptable.
Nonetheless, they are all less expensive than transferring on layer-one Ethereum, which, according to Etherscan, costs roughly $2.50 on average.
On May 3, BitInfoCharts reported an average transaction price of roughly $16, indicating that Ethereum remains prohibitively expensive for everyday use.
When Yuga Labs started their newest NFT collection on May 1, average gas fees soared to an all-time high of over $200, eliciting even more indignation from the crypto community.
The total value locked across all L2 networks has decreased to a little over $6 billion, according to the L2beat layer-two tracker. Since the beginning of April, when it was at an all-time high of $7.4 billion, it has dropped 18 percent.
With 57 percent of the TVL, Arbitrum is the market leader, which is remarkable given that it is one of the most costly L2 networks to utilize.
The dYdX exchange is in the second position with a 16 percent market share and just under $1 billion in TVL locked up, while Optimism is in third place with a ten percent market share and roughly $622 million in TVL locked up.