Transaction fee markets are essential components of blockchain economies, as they resolve the inherent scarcity in the number of transactions that can be added to each block. In early blockchain protocols, this scarcity was resolved through a first-price auction in which users were forced to guess appropriate bids from recent blockchain data. Ethereum's EIP-1559 fee market reform streamlines this process through the use of a base fee that is increased (or decreased) whenever a block exceeds (or fails to meet) a specified target block size. Previous work has found that the EIP-1559 mechanism may lead to a base fee process that is inherently chaotic, in which case the base fee does not converge to a fixed point even under ideal conditions. However, the impact of this chaotic behavior on the fee market's main design goal -- blocks whose long-term average size equals the target -- has not previously been explored. As our main contribution, we derive near-optimal upper and lower bounds for the time-average block size in the EIP-1559 mechanism despite its possibly chaotic evolution. Our lower bound is equal to the target utilization level whereas our upper bound is approximately 6% higher than optimal. Empirical evidence is shown in great agreement with these theoretical predictions. Specifically, the historical average was approximately 2.9% larger than the target rage under Proof-of-Work and decreased to approximately 2.0% after Ethereum's transition to Proof-of-Stake. We also find that an approximate version of EIP-1559 achieves optimality even in the absence of convergence.
翻译:交易费用市场是链链经济体的基本组成部分,因为它们解决了每块交易数量中可以增加到每块交易数量的内在稀缺性。 在早期的链链协议中,这种稀缺性是通过第一次价格拍卖解决的,在这一拍卖中,用户被迫从最近的链链数据中猜测适当的出价。 Eceenum的 EIP-1559 费用市场改革通过使用基准费简化了这一进程,而每当一个块超过(或未能达到)特定目标区块规模时,基准费就会增加(或减少)。先前的工作发现,EIP-1559 机制可能会导致一个固有的混乱性基准费进程,在这种情况下,即使理想条件下,基准费也不会达到固定点。然而,这种混乱行为对收费市场主要设计目标 -- -- 其长期平均规模等于目标的区块 -- -- 的影响,以前没有探讨过。由于我们的主要贡献,我们发现EIP-1559 机制的时间平均区块规模的上限和下限几乎是最佳的。我们较低的约束与目标的使用水平相等,而我们的上限甚至更接近一个固定点点,我们的上限甚至比我们的上限要高出6 %的标值,在历史正标度之后, 。