Post London EIP-1559 Assessment Part II (Breakout #13)

[timbeiko]

Date and Time

Date/Time: Friday, Sept 10 at 14:00 UTC (10:00 ET)
Duration: 60 mins

Post-London discussion and assessment of EIP-1559 for implementers, tooling, and infrastructure providers.

Agenda

• Presentation from Metamask, Jake Haugen

[timbeiko]

I might not be able to join the call (@tvanepps is hosting), but want to share some observations using 1559 over the past few weeks.

It seems like some applications pre-generate transactions for wallets to sign and set both the maxPriorityFeePerGas and maxFeePerGas to the same value, at ~2x the current baseFeePerGas. Here is an example from matcha.xyz on MetaMask (not to pick on matcha, I've experienced this across many applications):

My intuition is that the application or the library it uses to generate transactions probably doesn't have 1559 support and sets both fields to a legacy gasPrice value or something. I really see no case when it makes sense for maxFee to be exactly equal to maxPriorityFee: either you are in a low-demand mode, and maxPriorityFee should be a few gwei, or you are in a high-demand mode, and you should set maxPriorityFee to, say, the 80th or 90th percentile maxPriorityFee from the past handful of blocks [0]. Legacy transactions are processed using maxPriorityFee == maxFee, but if we can save users money at the wallet layer, it makes sense to modify the txn to do so.

Perhaps this is something that wallets can catch and fix? It might be a bit hacky, but something like if the maxFeePerGas is exactly equal to the maxPriorityFeePerGas in an application-generated transaction, then either alert the user or update the values behind the scenes based on the wallet's own oracle?

On this last note, it seems like the oracles from wallets have improved over the past couple weeks :-)

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[0] I haven't run the numbers on this, but I suspect when >3 blocks are 100% full, it is likely a good indication we've moved from one mode to the other.

[timbeiko]

Recording of the call https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtkU2773K6w