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Vitalik Buterin wants a wallet fund for developers, users send mixed reactions

Photo of: Sangeetha Golchha
by Sangeetha Golchha

Vitalik Buterin, the leader, creator, and co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain project has given a proposal which is to increase user fees on the network. This is mainly suggested in order to increase user fees on the network so that the developers can be supported with funding which is sufficient for them to carry on. 

Buterin tweeted on Friday and expressed his thoughts for the users to react. He said:

“I propose we consider supporting a community norm that client [and] wallet [developers] can [and] should charge a 1 gwei/gas fee for [transactions] sent through their wallet.”

Gas fees which are denominated in gwei are payments made by the user in order to compensate for the computational energy required to process as well as validate transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. 

He suggested to a good measure that if there is a flat, one-off payment of one gwei, that is $0.01 equates about 73,000 gwei for the transactions that are sent out to ethereum wallets, then the entire scheme of things could collectively raise at least up to $2 million in a year. He further wrote:

“At the cost of only increasing average user gas costs by [roughly] 7 percent, it would raise up to [$2 million per year] in sustainable, non-institutionally biased, market-based funding for client/wallet developers. For reference, that would cover all [Ethereum Foundation] grants to date … with room to spare.”

The Ethereum creator stressed that he would like to see the fee as a norm and not as a mandate in the Ethereum ecosystem. He was also asked how he could possibly stop users from freeriding and circumventing these costs. He noted that while it was a sure shot possibility that such a thing happened, the fee could be set low enough so that invecentivitizing the development of pirated ETH clients could be avoided to a larger extent. 

“Remember that an ethereum wallet/client is inherently a high trust thing; a bad one could steal all your money. This works against forking wallets to remove the fee, I would predict to a large extent.”

The crypto community had initially given Buterin a mixed response but the criticism and negations started building up. One user even said that earlier a wallet called MultiBit attempted a similar thing but users would not be willing to pay for something that was free for them previously.  Another user showcased that if fees were added for certain purposes like the one mentioned above it would only multiply in other countries and very soon a trend of collecting taxes on crypto transactions could begin everywhere. 

Source: Twitter

This was the tweet that the concerned user spoke about and brought another perspective into it.

Earlier Buterin had proposed fees to pay for storage of the network and also for account creation quite similar to those present on the EOS Blockchain. He also compared Bitcoin to a pocket calculator recently and Ethereum to a smartphone considering that ETH is pretty much capable of doing anything well.