The Creator of Ethereum Vitalik Butorin proposed to charge for the use of the Ethereum network the so-called" rent", the amount of which will depend on the duration of data storage in the blockchain. He wrote about it in a blog on the website Eth Research.
According to Butorin, thus the Ethereum network can cope with the growing number of users of the platform and the volume of data. In particular, popular commercial applications like CryptoKitties, as well as ICO-projects, have an additional burden on the network.
Other Ethereum developers have also supported the introduction of" rent".
"Nobody likes to talk about rent, but we have to talk about it. The current system in its current form is unstable," Raul Johnson wrote on Twitter.
According to Buterin, it is possible to calculate the data storage fee based on the long-term limit on the part of special data of the Ethereum network stored by nod operators.
Thus, the amount of data that is stored in the memory of the computer with an active node, in his opinion, should not exceed 500 GB. To maintain this limit, users will have to pay a fee based on how long their data is stored. If the amount of data stored increases, the fee will also increase.
"I propose to introduce a fee for annual storage of 500 GB in the amount of 500 000 ETH, that is, 1 byte will cost 0,000001 ETH," Buterin said, adding that after sharding, when blockchain nodes do not have to store all the data, the fee will fall about a hundred times.
Also, the founder of Ethereum offers to allow users access to data even after their expiration, because the latter can not always be predicted.
Some members of the Ethereum community went beyond just supporting Buterin's new idea, suggesting that "rents" should be introduced in all blockchains, as scaling issues and the associated costs are relevant for all networks.
"No cryptocurrency has yet developed a good pricing model for the use of these resources, and the introduction of rent for storage of data in Ethereum is a step in the right direction to achieve this goal," says developer Phil Dayan.
it is known that in mid-January, the congestion of the Ethereum network led to Bitstamp and KuCoin exchanges temporarily suspending the output of ETH. According to etherscan.io, back in October 2017, the number of transactions in the network did not exceed 519 thousand per day, but in January this figure rose to 1.34 million.