Ethereum price (ETH/USD): Vitalik Buterin proposes extra fee for wallet transactions

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, believes that increasing user fees on the network could provide enough funding for blockchain developers to support their research and development efforts.

As reported by industry website Coindesk, Buterin has argued client and wallet developers should charge “1 gwei/gas” fee for transactions sent through their wallets.

Gas fees, which are denominated in gwei ($0.01 is roughly 73,000 gwei), are payments users make for their transactions to be processed and validated on the Ethereum network. The addition of a flat 1-gwei fee, to be paid to developers, could raise up to $2 million per year, according to Buterin.

“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,” he wrote on Friday, as quoted by Coindesk. “For reference, that would cover all [Ethereum Foundation] grants to date … with room to spare.”

Buterin envisions the extra fee as a “community norm”, rather than a mandate and argues that there is already a high level of trust between users and their Ethereum wallets, given that “a bad [wallet] could steal all your money”.

However, some members of the community have been sceptical of whether users would embrace an extra fee. As noted by Coindesk, one user pointed to Bitcoin wallet MultiBit as an example of a blockchain project that had tried, but ultimately failed to implement such a fee.

Still, Buterin appears to be optimistic, as he told Coindesk that community feedback to his proposal has in general been “very encouraging” and that he hoped to see its realisation in Ethereum wallet soon.

In today’s trading, the Ethereum price stood at $133.76, as of 17:13 GMT. The digital coin has lost nearly 2% of its value, according to digital currency tracker Coinmarketcap.