Ethereum 2.0: Upcoming Upgrade Will Not Eradicate High Gas Fees

The growing anticipation of the Merge of the Ethereum network's Beacon Chain with the current Proof-of-Work (PoW) mainnet to usher in the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) version of the protocol has generated a number of misconceptions from the public.

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has come out to debunk some of these misconceptions, one of which is relative to the issue of gas fees.

The EF said the emergence of Ethereum 2.0 will not be a panacea for lower gas fees as the upgrade is a change of consensus mechanism, not an expansion of network capacity, and will not result in lower gas fees. 

"Gas fees are a product of network demand relative to the network's capacity. The Merge deprecates the use of proof-of-work, transitioning to proof-of-stake for consensus, but does not significantly change any parameters that directly influence network capacity or throughput," the EF said.

The foundation said future rollup technology upgrades are projected to help taper down the high gas fees. Ethereum's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has also supported the push of Layer-2 rollups in pushing down the higher gas fees to accepted levels.

Besides the clamour on gas fees, the misconception about the Merge ushering in faster transactions was also corrected. According to the Ethereum Foundation, while there is a slight change in the transaction speed on the Beacon Chain and the PoW network, the chances that the speed of transactions on the Layer-1 protocol will largely remain the same.

The Beacon Chain went live back in December 2020 and has been running parallel with the Ethereum mainnet since then. A lot of debugging has been done since the development of Ethereum 2.0 was made public. With so much work now being put into The Merge, the anticipation for the proposed launch is now being directed to September 15 - 19 - the tentative date.