By
Svetlana Soroka
March 25th, 2024
Block producers EOS New York has proposed cutting down on RAM required to open new accounts thereby cutting costs by 25%.
The EOS block producers have finally found a way to incentivize new users by cutting down the onboarding costs. EOS New York made an official announcement on Thursday saying that 15 block producers have agreed to the new protocol. The new protocol talks about reducing costs for a new account from 4 kibibytes (KiB) to 3 KiB. EOS New York is one of the 21 EOS block producers elected to do transaction verification on the network.
EOS’ Existing Issues
The EOS platform managed to garner a lot of public attention due to its promise of providing better operational capabilities over the Ethereum network. EOS claims that its platform can address scalability issues much better than the Ethereum blockchain.
However, with time the EOS network has turned out to be expensive for developers to launch smart contracts and DApps. The EOS network users have to ultimately bear these costs. Hence getting users onboard to the EOS platform has turned out to be difficult with developers preferring to launch their programs on Ethereum blockchain.
The high cost of RAM has turned out to be a major hurdle thereby making it expensive to open new user accounts. EOS creator Dan Larimer has proposed some changes at the network protocol level to reduce costs. The good thing is a majority of the block producers have unanimously agreed to implement those changes.
EOS Proposed Changes
To cut the onboarding costs, the EOS New York blog posts explains cutting the RAM usage by stating:
“The default EOS blockchain hard-codes a RAM usage of 3 KB per account where 1.5 KB is currently reserved for future expansion. This was an overly conservative estimate. Upon closer auditing of actual RAM usage per account, we have concluded that only 512 bytes are required for each new account. Block.one will provide an update to the system contract that will create 1.5 KB of RAM per account and retroactively offset the overly conservative usage estimate.”
The blog post also emphasizes on the need of making it easy to create new accounts. To push the early adoption, it will also help to get decentralized app developers easily to the platform. The post explains:
“EOS account creation cost is an extremely important aspect of the health of the platform. Many users of EOS decentralized applications are early adopters, people who are eager and willing to spend the time to understand the EOS blockchain. But in the future, users will not be as eager.”
In addition to improving RAM usage, getting CPU is another issue that block developers need to address to get more developers and users on the EOS network. To get this, developers need to make a stake wherein the network participants will delegate EOS tokens to a particular kind of smart contract.
Laimer has also proposed a model to get the CPU but it has yet to be approved by the block producers.