Does your blockchain need multidimensional fees?

The design of a transaction fee mechanism for a Blockchain starts with the question of specifying exactly the resources that the transactions compete over and need to pay for. While having a single “gas’” measure that aggregates all resources into a single dimension is simple and convenient, it’s worth considering different resources separately, leading to, so-called multidimensional fees.

Noam Nisan (Hebrew University) begins by making the distinction between easy dimensions of fees that do not represent congestion within a single block and hard dimensions that represent resources that may get congested within a block. The former are easily handled by minimum prices, while the latter are difficult to handle. He provides two simple results: (1) how long-term capacity constraints (such as state size) may be handled as easy dimensions using a simple EIP-1559-like pricing dynamic; and (2) a method of estimating the loss of efficiency that can be caused by folding all hard dimensions into a single easy-to-handle gas measure.

About the presenter

Noam is a Professor of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is a principal researcher in the blockchain company Starkware and has previously served as a researcher in Microsoft and in Google. Noam has published several books and over one hundred research papers on Computational Complexity and on Economics and Computation. Among his awards are the Gödel Prize, the Knuth Award, the EATCS prize, the Rothschild Prize, and the ACM SigEcom Lifetime achievement award.

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