The Gas Price Struggle (May, 2020)
If you haven’t noticed, Ethereum gas prices have been a bit high lately. High gas prices are rough for DAOs to say the least, and we’ve been hearing from many DAOs about their struggle to operate when voting and proposing are so expensive.
If these gas prices continue, there are a few bandaids we can use to help today, and there are a number of good long-term solutions on the horizon.
What we can do today
- Minimize transactions: when voting and proposing, try to minimize the number of transactions. First, discuss and create as much off-chain consensus as possible, and only then create the proposal. You should be able to boost and pass the proposal with only a single vote in DAOstack’s system.
- Deploy to xDai: we can deploy new DAOs or copies of DAOs to POA’s xDai chain (Alchemy is connected to xDai here), where transactions are much faster and cheaper. Please reach out to us here if you need to launch an xDai DAO.
What we can do in the future
First off, we expect these gas prices will not continue indefinitely. Transaction costs may still be an issue long term, though. Luckily, some promising solutions are coming down the pipe. These include:
- Rollups: organizations like Optimism and Starkware are making quick progress building optimistic and zk-rollups, two of the more promising layer 2 scaling options. Both promise much faster and cheaper transactions.
- Ethereum 2.0: the longest term solution, Eth 2.0 promises to dramatically help this issue, and the first testnets for it are running now. Don’t hold your breath for this one, but it is coming.
We’re also exploring some of our own ideas, and we may have more updates on the issue soon. Thanks for sticking with us through this gas price storm, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have a DAO struggling with this problem today!
