Ethereum Proposal Advances Gas Fee Tokenization and Quantum Resistance

A proposal to modify Ethereum's transaction structure has been quietly advancing for months. Vitalik Buterin mentioned the proposal, EIP-8141, on Sunday.

The plan would allow users to pay gas fees in tokens or have someone else cover them entirely. It achieves this by splitting a transaction into three steps: validation, payment approval, and execution.

EIP-8141 replaces the fixed shape of an Ethereum transaction with up to 64 'frames', each being an ordinary contract call. This would enable wallets that only hold stablecoins to transact, paying fees in ERC-20 tokens or have applications sponsor their users outright without needing a new wallet.

The proposal addresses not just fees but also the potential for quantum computers to break elliptic-curve cryptography used by Ethereum today. Co-author Matt Garnett notes that post-quantum signatures are several kilobytes each, forcing the network towards signature aggregation.